Woman arrested in attack of homeless shelter in north Minneapolis, police say

A 33-year-old woman has been arrested in connection with damage and threats to residents of a homeless shelter last week in north Minneapolis, Police Chief Brian O’Hara said.

Multiple security cameras of St. Anne’s Place, a shelter for homeless women and their children, captured repeated assaults involving nearly a dozen people on their residents and building on the night of Sept. 5.

Minneapolis police investigators delivered their findings to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office for possible charges of felony property damage and riot, according to a statement released by the police Thursday evening.

The Star Tribune has reviewed full-length exterior and interior footage from three cameras showing people — apparently neighbors from two homes across the street — pursuing residents across the front yard of the property before slugging two closed doors of the shelter with a bat, causing glass to burst into the main hallway of St. Anne’s Place, with women holding babies on just the other side.

A neighbor can be clearly seen making a long gun gesture toward the front door. A shelter resident’s van was smashed before and after police arrived, and possibly shot.

The entire incident lasted about four hours. Shelter staff said ongoing disputes over street parking led up to the attack.

Here’s a clip of the attack on the building’s side door:

According to the statement from police, O’Hara said the investigation began immediately and has been ongoing since. He said investigators collected and reviewed surveillance video, interviewed witnesses and worked to track down victims and suspects.

“This incident was disturbing and involved multiple levels of potential crime which has made this ongoing investigation labor-intensive,” said O’Hara. He added that he believed “further arrests may still occur.”

The footage, which contains no audio, shows police arriving after most of the violence had already taken place. Once they leave, neighbors can be seen resuming vandalism of the shelter resident’s car, knocking off a side-view mirror to a minivan of a St. Anne’s resident and sending it bouncing across the street. A different set of police officers briefly return to the scene at one point, but they may not have realized that the vehicle had been further damaged since their colleagues’ departure.

Officials with People Serving People, which has operated St. Anne’s Place since May, criticized the police response. The footage confirms that Minneapolis officers spoke first to the aggressors before making their way over to the shelter, where several people had called 911. People Serving People officials said the first officers to arrive were dismissive of victims and made no arrests despite some parts of the security footage clearly showing the assailants’ faces.

People Serving People has vacated St. Anne’s Place, relocating about 50 women and children in area hotels at a cost of $9,000 a night, which CEO Hoang Murphy called unsustainable. If St. Anne’s Place is not made safe enough for staff and residents to return, People Serving People must make room for them in its other shelters, reducing the nonprofit’s capacity to take in others experiencing homelessness.

Murphy contacted Mayor Jacob Frey and the City Council requesting a legitimate investigation of the attacks.

“I personally think the assailants were emboldened by the police response,” said Murphy, who called several City Council members before getting a mobile police camera outside of St. Anne’s Place. “If it can happen to us, an organization of our size as the sole contracted family shelter provider for Hennepin County, then what are homeless families supposed to do?”

On Tuesday, MPD spokesman Garrett Parten told the Star Tribune that police had not yet downloaded the security footage, but that officers’ nonpublic reports shows the shelter’s narrative was “not accurate.”

Later that night, Parten sent media outlets a statement saying no arrests were made on Sept. 5 because “tensions were high between the two groups at the scene” and “officers worked diligently to de-escalate the scene to gather the necessary information.” Both sides claimed to have been assaulted, and police could not tell if anyone had to be arrested.

Parten stated: “Until Sept. 10, no video of an assault has been identified or made available.”

Contradicting MPD, People Serving People provided the Star Tribune with a still image from an interior camera showing Minneapolis police using St. Anne’s computers to watch the security footage on Sept. 5.

On Wednesday night, Parten acknowledged that officers did watch portions of the surveillance video on Sept. 5. He did not say why police didn’t confiscate the video.

Parten said an investigator has been assigned to the case, and that Fourth Precinct officers are conducting extra patrols in the neighborhood of St. Anne’s, 2634 Russell Av. N. Acting Inspector Richard Hand has since spoken with the leadership of St. Anne’s Place, he said.