How did shooter find Minnesota lawmakers' homes? It's easier than most people think

MINNEAPOLIS — The alleged assassin fled on foot after shooting lawmakers last weekend, leaving behind his SUV strewn with firearms, a first-aid kit and several spiral-bound notebooks full of blue-inked scrawl.

One of the notebooks, pictured in the federal complaint charging Vance Boelter with the murder of Melissa and Mark Hortman, and the attempted murder of Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, features two pages lined with various “people search” sites. The online search engines aggregate personal data such as home addresses, phone numbers and relatives, all available to browse for free or for a small fee.

It is unclear whether Boelter used these search engines or state-affiliated public directories to find the Hortmans’ home address, as well as other lawmakers’ homes. In the immediate aftermath of Saturday’s assassinations, home addresses of local and state representatives were taken down from the Minnesota Legislature’s official website, where they’d been posted for years.

Despite that quick effort to protect representatives from violence, much of their personal information remains available online thanks to those private brokers that buy and sell sensitive data with minimal government regulation.

Some worry there could be grave consequences.

“It’s a cause for concern, certainly for any of us who wish to have our information be not accessible to the public,” said Sen. Ron Latz, DFL-St. Louis Park. “The problem is, the government doesn’t have as much control over private data information that we have over public information.”

The Minnesota Government Data Practices Act dictates what data is considered public and what is private, classifying information such as names, titles and birth dates of public officials as public, while home addresses are typically private. An address may be disclosed if officials choose to make it public, which many legislators do to prove that they in fact live in the district that they represent. Once an official chooses to disclose their address, it becomes public information.

“There’s a value to citizens or residents of a district knowing who their legislators are and that they live in the neighborhood right nearby. It’s a sense of accountability and accessibility,” Latz said. “That’s really important for democracy. But it’s also really important for democracy that legislators — duly elected representatives — be able to perform their duties safely and without fear, let alone being alive.”

In 2024, the Legislature passed the Minnesota Judicial and Court Staff Safety and Privacy Act, which classifies judges and court employees’ residential addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and the names of children and spouses as private data. Judicial officials can request the removal of this sensitive information wherever it publicly appears.

The law resulted from numerous judicial officials reporting stalking, harassment and death threats, which frequently targeted family members too. No such legal protection exists for members of the Legislature.

Sen. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, has lived in the same home for 40 years. He said that attempts to scrub his personal information from the internet are “not going to make any difference.”

Regardless of whether state-affiliated webpages remove home addresses, data brokers that have already acquired this sensitive information can buy, sell and trade personal data without significant regulation. That’s because people-search websites typically aggregate information that was available to the public at one point in time. Even if the source has been deleted, the already gleaned data remains on these third-party platforms until they get rid of it.

“I don’t think data brokers should be legal,” said Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley. “I’ve always had a lot of issues with the way that our data gets sold. You can’t even live in public life without having to give just an inordinate amount of information to some tech company, who then turns around and sells it.”

People-search websites cast a new shadow on the safety of public officials, who are reeling from Saturday’s shootings.

“It’s a different world. I mean, we’ve never had to worry about this,” Abeler said. “If you’re the president or a U.S. senator, you worry about these things. It’s a whole new watershed. It’s just a total game changer.”

Abeler said his fellow representatives “shouldn’t feel safe” just because their addresses have been removed from state websites.

“There are people out there who will sell anything to anybody. And I don’t know how you make them stop. We pass laws that say you can’t sell it,” he said. “Well, we have laws that say people shouldn’t shoot somebody, right? You can’t legislate your way out of immorality.”

Don Gemberling, secretary of the Minnesota Coalition on Government Information, a nonprofit public records watchdog, said that wiping personal addresses from government websites “wouldn’t change a thing.”

“Because you then just go to the private sector,” he said. “Is it worth making it harder for constituents to find out who represents them, measured against the risk to elected officials, when in the background is the fact that you’re not really seriously diminishing the risk to elected officials if you don’t do something about the private sector?”

“The seriously disturbed, or in the case of Boelter, the serious ideologues,” he said, “are going to do whatever it is they have to do to find somebody.”

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