"We're not looking at this as a hate-crime thing," says [Anoka County] Sheriff's Department Capt. Len Christ. "We're looking at it as youth acting up in a very inappropriate and disturbing manner."
Beth Hawkins, June 24, 1998
Down in the basement, the officers discovered the third boy and eight-year-old Nali, both with black material around their necks, both "still warm." The last victim to be found was five-year-old Tang Kee. She was on the floor in the bathroom, black strip around her neck, her body warm to the touch.
An officer later noted that "each child was in a separate room on each floor level, away from the others." That detail, along with the St. Paul medical examiner's finding that "the bodies of the children were in different stages of rigor," suggests they were killed at different times, and possibly out of sight of each other.
As a paramedic treated [the children's mother, Khoua Her] on the front steps, a crowd began to gather. Watching Her sitting there in the red dress, head lolling from side to side, one neighbor recalls, "I didn't know she was the parent. I thought she was the kid. She's so small."
Mary Ellen Egan, November 18, 1998
When Wesley and Schendel enter the store, Gallup is napping. He gets up and comes to the service window, then invites the two men into the back room....For 20 minutes, the three exchange small talk, mostly about a stack of CDs sitting nearby. Wesley is agitated. The threshold is crossed.
"Gregg got up to get a CD. I'm behind him, to his right. Whenever Kenny and I made contact, he's communicating with his eyes: 'Do it. What are you waiting on?' I pulled the switchblade out of my pocket. Once the knife was in my right hand and open, there was an urgency to try and get this thing over with.
"I didn't get into position to do the old Wesley Snipes move. I was probably three or four feet away as Gregg was leaning over to put the CD in the stereo. At that point, the movie only came into play as far as the neck seemed to be my target. I made my first lunge and struck him in the neck. Gregg let out a yell and moved to the back door. The first thing he said was, 'I'll split it with you.'
"From that point, he went on to repeatedly beg me not to do it. 'No, Carl. No.' He's moving to the back door. I'm in pursuit. Now I'm trying to silence him. I'm sure I could've stopped after 20 blows. But he was still vocal, which was a clear indication that he wasn't done with."
David Schimke, November 25, 1998
It had taken [Dennis Williams] five applications, a discrimination complaint, and a lawsuit to get a menial job; he'd watched dozens of less persistent white applicants land the well-paid union positions while city staffers lost his paperwork, made mistakes that cost him interviews, and--after he had the temerity to complain--put a "problem applicant" flag in his file. By the time the city finally notified him that he had been hired, Williams had checked himself into the psychiatric ward of the Veterans Medical Center, more angry and depressed than he'd ever been in his life. And for the seven weeks preceding the court hearing, he had been sitting in the Hennepin County Jail because a psychiatrist had told the city that Williams, in treatment, had spoken of his thoughts about "messing some people up."
Beth Hawkins, February 10, 1999
"You hear lawyers talk about going down South to do these death-row cases, and what a moving emotional experience it is. But you try walking into a courtroom with a dying woman who should be in the hospital getting treatment. She didn't murder anybody. Her crime was that she bought an insurance policy that turned out to be a lottery ticket.
"You get to the point where you don't even celebrate winning. I remember one, the family was ecstatic, and I walked out of the courtroom and got in the car just dreading it, knowing that we had two more cases in the file. Because sooner or later"--Minnesota's attorney general labors to hold back the tears--"you know you are going to lose."
Britt Robson, March 3, 1999
"I have a question to put to you," says [retired police officer and doorknob expert Arthur] Paholke. "You're walking through a shabby neighborhood and you see a doorknob and say, 'I don't have one of those.' You look around and there are a couple of people around, doesn't look like a squad car's gone through here for the last 20 years. Would you steal it?"
Katy Reckdahl, March 31, 1999
[John] Wodele checks his watch and abruptly announces, "Chris, I gotta go. Do you need anything else? I can call you from the car." He pulls on his gray sportcoat and speedwalks out of his office, down into the bowels of the Capitol and the tunnels below. Mid-trek he takes a hard right into the men's room.
As he pauses at a urinal, the First Flack offers, "The governor doesn't have time to bleed. I don't have time to pee."
Burl Gilyard, June 9, 1999
