🚨 Eight wounded in Monday night shooting at 28th and Lake encampment
After months of contention between the city and building owner, crews began clearing the encampment Tuesday morning.
Note: This story is free for everyone. For access to everything else, become a subscriber.
An apparent shootout last night at the private-property homeless encampment near 28th and Lake left eight people injured, four of them in life-threatening condition.
The shooting happened around 10 p.m. Monday. People running from the gunfire first flagged down an off-duty officer working security at Target. Police say they found five people injured at the site and another three transported themselves to nearby hospitals. (A later city report listed seven injuries.)
Police say they don’t yet have a detailed account of what happened or a suspect, but that preliminary evidence suggests there was an exchange of gunfire between at least two shooters and that “individuals came here with a purpose.” Seemingly unrelatedly, a tent also caught on fire overnight, requiring the fire department to extinguish it.
The encampment has been the center of a well-publicized battle between city officials and property owner Hamoudi Sabri. A longtime neighborhood property owner, Sabri opened the parking lot of his long-vacant building at 2716 East Lake in July to homeless residents, as part of what he’s characterized as a protest against the city’s approach to clearing encampments. A few dozen people have been living there.
Since then, city crews have twice shown up to clear the lot, but abandoned the efforts after resistance from Sabri. Last month Sabri and homelessness advocate Sheila Delaney hosted a press conference on the site decrying what they say is the city’s policy of bulldozing encampments without a plan for where the residents will go next, creating a “revolving door of trauma.” The city reports that its Homeless Response Team has visited the site every weekday since July 2 and that Hennepin County's Streets to Housing team has visited at least three times per week since then.
Last week the city council narrowly approved a contentious plan to bring legal action against Sabri in order to clear the property, citing health and safety concerns for both the encampment residents and the surrounding neighbors, including Universal Academy Charter School next door. Longfellow councilmembers Jason Chavez and Aurin Chowdhury both voted against the plan, expressing concern that the residents would just form encampments elsewhere and urging the resources to be spent on other solutions. Sabri had indicated he would fight the lawsuit to prevent the site from being cleared, calling it “political theater at the expense of real solutions.”
(Update 9/16: Chavez, whose Ward 9 includes the property, wrote Tuesday that "We have seen a pattern under this administration when it comes to helping our unhoused neighbors. An encampment is formed, violence occurs, the encampment is removed, and the unhoused residents move to another location due to the fact there are insufficient shelter beds available. This is not a solution and it’s not sustainable.")
While the city had been waiting for the lawsuit to proceed, after the shooting, Mayor Jacob Frey ordered the camp cleared immediately, saying “When you have anything that ends, a huge portion of the time, with either an explosion or significant shooting, that thing should probably not be allowed to continue. That’s the case with this homeless encampment.”
By 10 a.m. Tuesday more than a dozen police cars and a variety of public works vehicles and garbage trucks had arrived to begin the clearing. A small group watched on, some asking police if they could retrieve their personal belongings, to no avail. Many former residents dispersed to neighboring blocks, including a contingent at the newly-built soccer field across the street.
The city also cleared and fenced off another recurring encampment on a pathway between the 35-W Transit Center and Midtown Greenway yesterday, where a shooting earlier in the day left five injured. In response to a rash of recent gun violence in the area, police chief Brian O’Hara said the state will provide State Troopers as additional patrols along Lake Street.
This is a developing story. Updates will be posted to the web version.