St. Paul's East Side racked by violence, Sunday's triple homicide

The St. Paul neighborhood where a triple homicide took place Sunday has its share of makeshift memorials.

Around the corner from the scene in the Payne-Phalen area, up against the fence in an alleyway, a decorated cross and T-shirt marks where 20-year-old Izavier Olguin was shot and killed two Octobers ago. Six months ago, 34-year-old St. Paul resident Yuliya Li was killed by a gunshot less than a mile west of Sunday's killings.

A day after Sunday's attack in an East Side home that left three dead and two critically wounded, neighbors and family members of the victims gathered outside a church to hear police, pastors and the city's mayor call for an end to retaliatory violence.

Janis Jaja, a resident of Payne-Phalen for 27 years, stood with two grandsons and a neighbor's child, shaking her head.

"I didn't know the family," Jaja said. "But it could be anybody's family."

As of Monday evening, St. Paul police are still looking for the person or people behind the Sunday afternoon triple homicide that took the lives of 33-year-old Angelica Gonzales, 42-year-old Cory Freeman and 44-year-old Maisha Spaulding.

Twenty-four hours earlier, the attack that unfolded inside the two-story gray house with red trim and a disheveled fence on the 900 block of E. Case Avenue left a crime scene characterized by a St. Paul police spokesman as one of the most "complex" in the city in a long time.

At a news conference Monday outside nearby Holy Trinity Orthodox Church, Interim St. Paul Police Chief Jeremy Ellison stopped short of elaborating on the spokesman's words, noting only the number of people shot and saying he wanted to be respectful of the children present at the news conference.

"This is not something that we see in our city," Ellison said.

Across the street from the church, a woman stood on the porch of the home where the shooting took place, holding a laundry basket of things and waiting for a friend's car to pull up. She said she lived upstairs in the converted duplex and was awakened from a nap Sunday by 11 gunshots.

"I'm going to find me a place to stay for a couple days," said the woman, who declined to give her name, citing her safety. "I'm pretty shook up about being here, period."

The woman added she'd seen "a lot of people coming through here."

As she pulled her basket to the corner, she passed a memorial of flowers.

Sunday's homicides bring the number of homicides in the capitol city to 27.

Gonzales was a mother of four, according to her older sister, Amanda Champion of St. Paul.

"She's going to be truly missed," said Champion, who said the family doesn't know details yet. "Wrong place. Wrong time."

At Monday's news conference, hosted with the African American Leadership Council and the St. Paul Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, Ellison said police believe they are pursuing the right suspect or suspects. But pressed by reporters on Monday, he did not state a motivation, only discounting that the attack was domestic-related.

After the official presentation, many attendees spoke about the violence they've seen in their communities.

"Just like we've seen deaths of COVID, we've seen plenty of deaths by people that know each other," said Keo D. Walker, a member with 21 Days of Peace, a local anti-gun violence initiative, who attended Monday's event.

The Rev. Melvin Miller of St. Paul's Progressive Baptist Church lamented addiction and mental illness. A neighbor described nearby residences overturned by the housing crisis of 2008.

But not every answer found agreement.

Mayor Melvin Carter pointed to a "polarized economy," as well as his office's neighborhood safety partnerships between alternative responders, such as the ministerial association, the police and the community. Carter also observed the lack of comprehensive gun control legislation at the state or federal levels.

"We're looking for the single solution," Carter said, "and there isn't one. This is a complex challenge."

Police say officers had been called 17 separate times to the residence the past year. Ellison said the raw number of calls isn't necessarily indicative of a specific problem. But he promised his team would undertake a "deep dive" into reviewing the calls to see if any telltale signs of pending violence were missed.

At the conclusion of the news conference, a woman approached saying one of the victims, Freeman, was her children's uncle. She declined to give her name, citing potential retaliation against her children. But she said one of her sons heard the gunshots out of his window on Sunday.