A man who lived with Vance Luther Boelter, suspected of shooting two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses on Saturday, said his lifelong friend had been “down” lately after returning from a trip.
David Carlson told reporters over the weekend that he’s known Boelter since the fourth grade and considered him a best friend. He said the two occasionally shared a rental near Minneapolis because it was close to their workplaces.
Carlson was shocked to learn his friend was a suspect in the recent shooting, saying that Boelter “wasn’t as cheerful as he used to be,” but he never expected him to commit any violence.
“He kept things inside,” Carlson said, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune. “He’s been kind of down. He was not as upbeat as he usually is.”
Boelter’s mood reportedly changed after returning from a trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he was trying to start up a new business, Carlson told the Washington Post.
The suspected gunman was reportedly facing some financial issues while trying to reach his “goal” of owning a private security company. He had worked at a funeral home but quit a few months ago to pursue a venture in the DRC.
According to Boelter’s LinkedIn profile, he was the CEO of a company called the “Red Lion Group”.
The losses he experienced from the failed venture led to him “struggling a bit”, Carlson said, and taking a job extracting eyeballs from cadavers to be used in organ donation.
Boelter is listed a “director of security patrols’ on the website of a Minnesota company called Praetorian Guard Security Services.
The website claims the company uses the same vehicles that police use, and that Boulter had “training by both private security firms and by people in the U.S. Military”. A report in NPR suggests that some claims about his professional life are untrue.
Carlson also said the company “wasn’t a reality” and that Boelter had just “bought a couple of cars and maybe some uniforms”.
Law enforcement officials believe that Boelter impersonated a police officer before approaching the home of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and state Senator John Hoffman and his wife.
Officials said the attack on the Democratic lawmakers was “politically motivated”. Law enforcement said they discovered a manifesto and a list of other politicians, officials, and organizations in the suspect’s vehicle.
Carlson told reporters that Boelter was a Christian who strongly opposed abortion but that his friend rarely spoke about politics.
Many of those mentioned on the list are Democratic lawmakers who have fought for abortion rights, according to reports.
Carlson told The Post that Boelter became a born-again Christian in high school and had begun preaching in parks to “spread the word about Jesus”.
“Vance was a very caring, loving person,” Carlson told The Post. “He’d help anybody. And he had a lot of friends that looked up to him. He was a spiritual person.”
