A day after a man shot and killed another person at a busy intersection in Plymouth, Minn., Friday night, and then died while exchanging gunfire with officers inside a nearby apartment building, witnesses to both events described terrifying scenes.
Some police officers were injured during the confrontation at the apartment complex, Plymouth Police Chief Mike Goldstein said at a news conference Saturday. He declined to say if they were shot. The injured officers were to be hospitalized at least overnight.
The series of events leading to the apartment shootout began just before 9:15 p.m., when callers to 911 reported that a person was lying in the road near the intersection of Northwest Boulevard and Rockford Road after being shot.
It was not clear whether the shooter and the person killed in the street knew each other, Goldstein said.
Four minutes later, someone called 911 to report that a man had pointed “a long gun” at him at an apartment complex.
Plymouth police officers went into the building to confront the gunman, and he was killed in the subsequent exchange of gunfire in “tight quarters,” Goldstein said. He said it was not yet known whether the gunman killed himself or was killed by police.
Bill Schletzer, a Plymouth resident, was stopped at a red light on the way home Friday night. A large SUV pulled up beside him in the left-turn lane, he said, before making a wild maneuver to drive in front of all the stopped cars and up the right shoulder.
That’s when Schletzer heard the gunshots. More than a dozen rang out as the suspect began chasing a woman around the intersection in his vehicle, Schletzer said. At one point, the woman leaned over a stopped driver’s passenger window pleading for help, he said, but everyone was frozen in their cars or already calling 911.
“You wouldn’t have wanted to get involved in this,” he said.
Without any assistance, the woman turned and ran in front of their cars to a patch of grass and snow off the road. The suspect continued shooting before running her down in the SUV at a high speed, Schletzer said. Then the man drove away.
“She just folded up like a rag doll,” he said. “This was the most violent and intense thing I’ve ever seen.”
Witnesses were left stunned in their cars, unable to move while waiting for police to arrive.
It remains unclear where the woman came from.
A woman who was among four apartment residents who encountered the suspect during a terrifying five minutes in the parking garage late Friday described what she saw.
Leah Grimes gave her account upon returning to the building Saturday afternoon after spending the night elsewhere.
The man drove recklessly into the parking garage as she parked her car and a family of two parents and a baby unloaded groceries just after 9 p.m., Grimes said. The driver’s window of the suspect’s vehicle was smashed, she said, and the driver appeared “nonsensical,” injured or intoxicated.
The two parents grabbed the baby just before the man’s car smashed into theirs, she said. “He wasn’t stopping, just slamming into (the family’s car) completely irrationally and erratically.”
The suspect got out wielding a gun, and the father tried to negotiate with him, Grimes said, pleading for the safety of his baby.
Grimes and the mother, who was holding the baby, hid behind parked cars and then ran toward a staircase in the opposite corner of the parking garage, racing up to the second floor. Grimes said she glanced backward, detected that the suspect wasn’t chasing them and “felt safe” enough to bolt.
After they reached Grimes’ second-floor apartment, they heard about 15 shots being fired, Grimes said.
As the drama unfolded, police and SWAT officers from several law enforcement agencies swarmed to the two locations, just east and west of Interstate 494 in Plymouth. The gunman, described as “an active shooter,” was said to have a black shotgun and multiple magazines, as well as wearing a bullet-resistant vest.
Residents in the area were told to stay inside. No one in the building where the gunman was killed.
