Minneapolis homeless encampment shooting leaves 1 dead, 2 injured
It was a violent, deadly Saturday morning at a small sidewalk encampment along 15th Avenue South in Minneapolis.
“I woke up about 4:30, and I heard boom, boom, boom, boom, and I heard seven shots before that,” says Geraldine Lufty, who lives a few blocks away. “We heard people up and down 22nd here, yelling, screaming ‘Help, help.’”
Responding MPD officers found three men shot: one of them is now dead and the two others are in critical condition with life-threatening injuries.
On Sunday, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office identified the victim as 31-year-old Deven Leonard Caston.
An encampment resident who spoke with 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS says he was sleeping and woke to the sound of gunfire.
“They just came by and shot everybody. Shot at everybody, I guess,” he says. “It sounded like it was an automatic weapon. Yeah, it was fast, rapid.”
Police say three suspects had approached the encampment and then shots rang out.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara says one of the victims had a small BB gun that looks like an actual pistol.
He says all three are known to police.
“These are folks that are at risk,” O’Hara told reporters. “So, they’re people that are either have been involved in crime, been witnesses to crime, or have been victims in the past.”
Homicide investigators are still trying to piece together a motive and who shot who.
But for neighbors, there are growing safety concerns.
Abdi, who didn’t want his last name used, showed us multiple bullet holes from rounds that ripped into his 80-year-old mother’s apartment building just across the street.
One of those rounds left a hole just feet above a child’s bed.
“It’s not safe around here,” Abdi declared. “She says she got some bullets into her apartment, so I came here and then I see two bullets in the wall, and then they go into another apartment.”
Since May, police have investigated at least seven shootings, five of them deadly, in or near encampments in the city.
O’Hara calls the encampments, which often move from place to place after being cleared, a magnet for crime.
And he sees particular issues about encampments in the Third Precinct.
“There are safety issues and they’re not humane places for people to be,” O’Hara says. “We know 19% of all gun violence, everything related to illegal guns and shootings occurs within 500 feet of an encampment — and we know about 23% of all shooting victims this year have been within 500 feet of an encampment.”
Several Minneapolis City Council members are proposing the idea of around-the-clock, supervised outdoor spaces for those experiencing homelessness.
These regulated locations are already in use in Denver, Colorado.
Abdi hopes city leaders in Minneapolis will make changes to stop the cycle of cleared encampments that pop up somewhere else.
“It’s sad, people living in the street all the time, so I wonder if the city can do something about it,” Abdi says. “Now, a lot of the homeless, they take up somewhere, and they come back in different places and half the time, they pop up everywhere.”
Lufty, who left a bouquet of flowers near the shooting scene Saturday, decried the violence.
“It’s crazy, it’s nonsense,” she says. “Every single person is a person… no one deserves to get shot, you know? Some of these people are outside, and they have nowhere else to go.”