One man dead, two others injured after shooting at a Minneapolis encampment
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A man is dead and two others in critical condition following an early morning shooting at a small Minneapolis encampment on Saturday.
The three men were in a residential area just southwest of Franklin and Bloomington Avenues on the city’s south side when three other individuals approached them around 4:30 a.m. and a shooting occurred, according to Minneapolis police.
Police have yet to identify those individuals or their motives.
A 911 caller reported the sound of automatic gunfire. Officers were called to the scene shortly after and found the three victims with life-threatening injuries. They were transported to the hospital, where one later died.
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Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said all three victims are “at-risk” people known to police — meaning they have been victims, witnesses to crime, or involved in crime in the past.
About 13 percent of all crime in the 3rd precinct of Minneapolis occurs within 500 feet of homeless encampments, O’Hara said. He added that nearly a quarter of shooting victims this year have also been in close proximity to encampments.
“This is an ongoing issue with encampments and just all of the activity that’s associated with it,” he said. “As soon as one encampment is cleared, another one pops up somewhere else, and crime in the area immediately raises.
“It’s a really, really, just frustrating and ongoing problem for the residents that live here. And it just goes to show, there’s issues. Whether they’re large or small, there’s safety issues and they’re just they’re not humane places for people to be.”
The shooting is weighing heavy on area residents — both housed and not — concerned about crime around encampments.
“It’s what makes it hard to live here,” said Paula Williamson, talking to O’Hara about her concerns. She has lived in the neighborhood since the 1970s. In recent years, it’s been at the center of conversations around homelessness in Minneapolis, with at times up to 100 people living in the now-closed encampments like Camp Nenookaasi and the “Wall of Forgotten Natives.”
No one has threatened her and everyone is friendly, Williamson said. Instead, she feels people are being moved around, rather than helped.
“It’s just been whack-a-mole,” she said.
So does 21-year-old Amelia Benjamin, who stays in a nearby tent and saw the victims as family.
“We need help. We’re out here dying,” she said, wrapping her arms around her body to cry. “We need housing or something. Man, something. We don’t need another ‘getting kicked out and having to move.’”
Benjamin is a descendant of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe and said many around her are also young Native people struggling to survive. She started abusing substances in 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and has been unsheltered since age 18. She said she’s been working to get sober.
“It is so hard to be out here like this and it just puts more f------ stress, just s--- like this happening when your homies are dying,” she said between tears. “It’s got to be different for our community, for our people. This thing’s gotta change. This can’t keep happening. It’s just tragic.”