Childhood friend says Minnesota suspect had ‘darkness inside of him’

Hours after the shootings of two Minnesota lawmakers over the weekend, authorities asked David Carlson to identify his lifelong friend in a harrowing photograph.

Carlson says he had known and trusted Vance Boelter from the time the two played together as children. But he barely recognized the 57-year-old in the surveillance image police showed him of Boelter wearing a flesh-colored mask as he carried out what authorities described as a political rampage.

“The guy with the mask, I don’t know that guy,” Carlson said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press, recounting his decades-long friendship with a man he likened to a brother. Boelter’s involvement in such an attack, he said, was as surprising to him as “getting struck by lightning.”

“There was a darkness that was inside of him,” Carlson said. “He must have kept it hidden.”

As authorities piece together Boelter’s movements and motivations, Carlson and others are conducting their own inventory of their interactions with the conservative evangelical pastor, wondering whether they missed any red flags.

Boelter is a married father of five but often stayed at Carlson’s home in Minneapolis to shorten his commute to work. In hindsight, Carlson said, Boelter “was a sick man” and needed help, even if those around him didn’t realize it in time.

Law enforcement has cautioned the motive could be more complex than pundits might prefer, even as Boelter’s own disjointed writings suggest he was hell-bent on targeting Democrats.

Boelter has been charged with federal murder and stalking, along with state counts, in the fatal shootings of former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark. He is also accused of wounding Democratic Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette.

At the time of the shootings, Carlson said Boelter had been struggling to find work and was “disappointed” he wasn’t hearing back from people.

In February, Boelter abruptly quit his job delivering bodies from assisted living facilities to a funeral home and returned for several weeks to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he had founded several companies focused on farming and fishing.

“I thought it was a mistake for him to quit his job,” Carlson said. “I didn’t think he was going to get anywhere with the Congo.”

But the life change was in keeping with Boelter’s impetuous “mentality to always go to the extreme,” Carlson said, recalling a time in the 1990s when Boelter was captured by security forces after sneaking into Gaza to preach Christianity on a trip to Israel. “That’s how crazy Vance is,” Carlson said. “He wasn’t supposed to be there.”

Years earlier, after becoming a Christian, Boelter “burned all of his belongings,” Carlson said, including karate and martial arts weapons and anything else that distracted from his religion.

Boelter graduated in 1990 from an interdenominational Bible college in Dallas, earning a diploma in practical theology in leadership. The Christ For The Nations Institute said in a statement it was “aghast and horrified” to learn the suspect was among its alumni, saying “this is not who we are.”

The church Boelter attended outside Minneapolis has not responded to emails from AP but issued a similar statement condemning the shootings as “the opposite of what Jesus taught his followers to do.”

Boelter, who worked as a security contractor, offered a glimpse of his opposition to abortion in a 2023 sermon he gave in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, saying “they don’t know abortion is wrong in many churches.”

“He wasn’t a radical cultist,” Carlson said. “He was just a regular Christian and kind of outspoken.”

Boelter was unrestrained when it came to his distaste for Democrats, Carlson said, but that rhetoric never seemed threatening. Carlson and another friend, Paul Schroeder, told AP they never heard Boelter talk about abortion or any of the officials who were targeted.

The FBI said Boelter “made lists containing the names and home addresses of many Minnesota public officials, mostly or all Democrats.”

“It wasn’t like, ‘We gotta stop them, man,’” Carlson said. “But it chills me to think he was in his room writing that stuff in my house.”

Boelter would go to a shooting range occasionally but was not fanatical about firearms, another friend, Paul Shroeder said.

“I thought he was just collecting them for self-defense,” Carlson said. “It was 1,000 miles away from stalking people and killing them.”

Carlson said he awoke Saturday to an alarming text message from Boelter, who warned he was “going to be gone for a while,” and “may be dead shortly.” Carlson initially thought his friend was suicidal and went to check his room.

He said he was so concerned he called police, who “at first didn’t seem too interested” before quickly connecting the messages to the shootings.

“Why throw your whole life away? God, he’s so stupid,” Carlson said. “He had everything.”

__ Associated Press writers Giovanna Dell’Orto in Minneapolis and Michael Biesecker in Washington contributed to this report.