A man with a violent criminal history shot and killed another person at a busy Plymouth intersection Friday night, then died while exchanging gunfire with officers inside a nearby apartment building.
"Multiple police officers" were "marginally injured" during the confrontation at the apartment complex, Plymouth Police Chief Mike Goldstein said at a news conference. He declined to say if they were shot, but the injured officers were to be hospitalized at least overnight.
The series of events leading to the apartment shootout began just before 9:15 p.m., when 911 callers reported that a person was lying in the road near the intersection of Northwest Boulevard and Rockford Road after being shot. Scanner traffic reported that the shooter had fled in a black vehicle.
It is not clear whether the shooter and the person killed in the street knew each other, Goldstein said.
Four minutes later, someone called 911 to report that a man had pointed "a long gun" at him at an apartment complex in the 5200 block of Annapolis Lane N., Goldstein said. He declined to confirm that the building was the shooter's residence, although scanner traffic reported that earlier.
Plymouth police officers went into the building to confront the gunman, and he was killed in the subsequent exchange of gunfire in "tight quarters," Goldstein said. He said it was not yet known whether the gunman killed himself or was killed by police.
Many details about the shootings remained unclear Saturday. Plymouth police said they'll hold a news conference at 3:30 p.m. at that town's City Hall to provide some information.
Bill Schletzer, a Plymouth resident, was headed east on Rockford Road, stopped at a red light at Northwest Boulevard on the way home from the gym Friday night. A large SUV pulled up beside him in the lefthand turn lane, he said, before making a wild maneuver to drive in front of all the stopped cars and up the right-hand shoulder.
That's when Schletzer heard the gunshots. More than a dozen rang out as the suspect began chasing a woman around the intersection in his vehicle, Schletzer said. At one point, the woman leaned over a stopped driver's passenger window pleading for help, he said, but everyone was frozen in their cars or already calling 911.
"You wouldn't have wanted to get involved in this," he said.
Without any assistance, the woman turned and ran in front of their cars to a patch of grass and snow off the road. The suspect continued shooting before running her down in the SUV at a high speed, Schletzer said. Then the man drove away.
"She just folded up like a rag doll," he said. "This was the most violent and intense thing I've ever seen."
Witnesses were left stunned in their cars, unable to move while waiting for police to arrive.
It remains unclear where the woman came from. Schletzer believed she must have fled the suspect's vehicle after a dispute because she wasn't seen walking in the area before the incident.
"There was no way this was random," he said. "Had everyone in that intersection been armed with guns, they couldn't have prevented what he did."
djoles@startribune.com Guy ran over and shot someone at Rockford Road and Northwest Boulevard in Plymouth. Then he took off to his apartment and is holed up in a bulletproof vest and shooting out the window.](https://arc.stimg.co/startribunemedia/AKJCBQSMT7VEPCZ246XVLNNUEM.jpg?&w=1080)
