Seantrell T. Murdock took a roundabout path to St. Paul the day police say he shot a Lowertown woman as she kneeled painting a mural.

The 29-year-old finished work in Plymouth and drove about 30 miles south to Lakeville, closer to his home in Scott County. He looped around to Burnsville and Eagan, before getting on Interstate 35E north and making his way to Shepard Road along the Mississippi River in St. Paul and then to Lowertown.

Carrie Shobe Kwok (Courtesy of Julie Shobe)

Surveillance video of the Sept. 25, 2024, killing of Carrie Shobe Kwok, 66, showed no confrontation or attempted robbery, police say. Other people were in the area, and it was still light out.

Police closed the case in December. They said they’d followed the evidence and it all pointed to Murdock, with no one else being involved.

Why Murdock did it and why he went to St. Paul will likely never be known. Just over 13 hours after the killing, as police tried to arrest Murdock, officers reported he raised a gun and they fatally shot him.

In a search for answers, the Pioneer Press reviewed hundreds of pages of law enforcement reports and interviewed investigators and people who knew Kwok and Murdock. They revealed more details of Murdock’s comings and goings before and after the homicide and how police quickly identified him.

Court filings in 2023 civil commitment proceedings say Murdock had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. When he was admitted to the hospital then, he reported experiencing paranoia and hallucinations, a court document said.

His mental health condition is the only reason that police can find for a potential explanation.

“We found zero link to the victim, why she was chosen, why he ended up in downtown St. Paul,” said St. Paul Police Senior Cmdr. Wes Denning, who’s in charge of the homicide unit.

“None of it made sense,” said Sgt. Natalie Davis, lead investigator on the case with Sgt. Jeff Thissen.

“The randomness of it was super sad,” Thissen added. It was also unusual because most homicides are carried out by someone the victim knows.

Murdock’s mother, April Murdock, doesn’t believe he did it.

“My son wasn’t a killer,” she said recently. “My son wasn’t like that. He had mental problems, but he would never kill anyone.”

Studies have found that people with serious mental illness are more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators of it.

Mother, grandmother, artist, woman of faith

Kwok moved into the Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative earlier in 2024. She worked with vintage clothing, textile art and handmade jewelry and enjoyed sewing, home design and remodeling.

“I think about her every day and miss her every day,” her sister, Julie Shobe, said recently.

She was a mother of two and a grandmother, and the glue who brought everyone together for family gatherings and holidays, Shobe said.

In one of son Bill Kwok’s last conversations with his mom, he complained he was thanklessly working toward the goals and happiness of everyone else and not his own.

“With a smile and a twinkling eye, she responded, ‘That’s what life is all about,’” Carrie Kwok’s grandson read from his father’s eulogy at her celebration of life last October.

“She was a patient and loving ear and a best friend to many, always ready to put her own projects aside and roll up her sleeves to get yours done,” according to Bill Kwok. “A lifelong artist, her life itself was an expression of this belief.”

Friend Pam Tucker remembered Carrie Kwok’s faith as “core and unconditional.”

Rosemary Williams and Kwok both went to Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis and later connected through a moms’ group and Bible study at their church.

“She was shabby chic before shabby chic was a thing,” Williams said.

She loved to restyle every home she lived in. She’d make cabinets and whittle holes for the knobs. She had an eye for fabrics and became a collector of rare and beautiful textiles.

Kwok had been working on vintage tablecloth shirts and wooden bead earrings, getting ready for the St. Paul Art Crawl.

Shooting at 5:16 p.m.

A small plaque adorns a mural that Carrie Kwok was painting in the alley behind the Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative in St. Paul. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Also in preparation for Art Crawl, the Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative was creating a public art piece in the building’s surface parking lot. Co-op members were painting it.

The co-op’s front door opens to an alley behind Kellogg Boulevard between Wacouta and Wall streets.

Surveillance footage showed the suspect parked on Sept. 25, 2024, at 5:15 p.m. He walked past Kwok. She looked in that direction, then back to her mural and continued painting.

He walked toward Kwok, reached into his front sweatshirt pocket, turned to Kwok and fired one shot and then multiple shots. It was 5:16 p.m., 24 seconds from when he’d first walked past her, according to timestamps from a video.

“It doesn’t appear there was any exchange between them whatsoever,” Denning said.

The man ran back to his vehicle and drove away, 24 seconds after the shooting.

People who lived in Kwok’s building were parking in the lot at the same time. They reported hearing shots and at least one ducked down for safety. They and other people rushed to try to help Kwok.

A man who lived nearby took off his shirt and held it on a gunshot wound on the back of Kwok’s head. Bystanders began chest compressions on Kwok. Officers and St. Paul Fire Department paramedics took over CPR, but Kwok could not be revived.

16 minutes after shooting, heading to church

Police and K-9s took up the search. Quickly, officers began pulling surveillance video from the area and saw the suspect had left in a silver Chevrolet Malibu. They identified the license plate, police reports say, and determined the car was registered to Seantrell Murdock, who lived about 45 minutes southwest in Belle Plaine.

Seantrell Tyreese Murdock is seen in a 2019 mugshot. (Courtesy of the Washington County Sheriff’s Office)

Police viewed more videos and saw the Chevrolet was heading toward Minneapolis. The car had been westbound on Ford Parkway in St. Paul, going toward the Ford Bridge, at 5:32 p.m., a law enforcement database with information about the locations of license plates showed.

A Minneapolis officer informed a St. Paul sergeant that another automated license plate reader spotted the Chevrolet on 36th Street near Chicago Avenue 10 minutes before they talked. The officer checked, but the car was gone.

The area is where Murdock went to church. Richard Lee, a minister at Worldwide Outreach for Christ, said Murdock stopped in and they talked “for a little bit.”

Murdock was pacing and Lee asked him, “Is everything OK?”

“He just seemed like he wasn’t himself,” said Lee, who’d met him at the church about a year earlier.

Lee asked Murdock how his family was and Murdock then “looked like he snapped back into reality,” the minister said.

After Murdock left, Lee called him to check if he was alright. Murdock told Lee he probably needed to get on medication, and Lee said he was there to talk whenever he needed.

The next day, when Lee found out that Murdock had been shot by police and was suspected in the St. Paul homicide, he was shocked.

“He was really trying to give his life over to Christ,” Lee said. “He was fighting on the inside, demons or whatever he was fighting, but he just wanted help.”

1 hour and 20 minutes after shooting, in hometown

Meanwhile, St. Paul police were told that a license plate reader in Belle Plaine had picked up the car there.

At 6:36 p.m., Murdock went into the Coborn’s Liquor in Belle Plaine and walked out with a $16 bottle of vodka, an employee later told police. He said he was familiar with Murdock from previous purchases, figured he forgot to pay and planned to bring it up when he saw him next.

Officers researching Murdock found records of his civil commitment proceedings, filed in Scott County District Court in 2023. When he was admitted to the hospital in January 2023, he reported “experiencing paranoia and auditory and visual hallucinations,” a court document said.

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A St. Paul officer wrote in a report: “Based upon this information and the apparent random nature of the crime, we believe Murdock may have been in a mental health crisis and experiencing a psychotic episode. … We were attempting efforts to quickly locate him.”

Police identified Murdock’s cellphone number and obtained information that showed where his phone pinged off cellphone towers. That’s how they tracked his phone’s path from Belle Plaine that morning to his work in Plymouth until 3:20 p.m. and then into Dakota County before pinging in downtown St. Paul at the time of the homicide.

Also, a search at the scene turned up yellow markings, possibly footprints, in the alley. Surveillance footage showed Kwok had been using yellow paint and it seemed the suspect stepped onto the colored walkway. Law enforcement later saw Murdock’s shoes appeared to have paint on the bottom.

Officers head to Belle Plaine

That evening, St. Paul police began heading to Belle Plaine. They set up surveillance around Murdock’s residence and developed plans for various scenarios.

“It was decided to not make contact with Murdock at the listed address due to his recent violent acts and possibility of being armed,” a Belle Plaine officer wrote in a report.

A regional SWAT team would not serve a warrant that evening due to children being in the home, but would in the morning when the kids left for school, a Belle Plaine sergeant wrote.

Seantrell Murdock seemed his normal self that night, April Murdock said. He and his family were cooking and listening to music.

April Murdock left for work about 6:15 a.m. on Sept. 26, 2024, and saw two vehicles in the area.

She called Seantrell Murdock, who was due to head to work soon, and told him a vehicle they’d seen outside the home the previous night was still there and she didn’t know why.

13 hours after shooting, a confrontation

Police on Oct. 1, 2024, released body worn camera footage showing the fatal shooting by St. Paul officers of homicide suspect Seantrell Tyreese Murdock in Belle Plaine on Sept. 26, 2024. (Courtesy of the St. Paul Police Department)

When Seantrell Murdock walked out of the home, two arrest teams pulled up in unmarked vehicles and activated their emergency lights at 6:42 a.m., body camera footage shows. The officers were wearing shirts that identified them as police.

Murdock pulled a handgun and began lifting it up as he walked toward St. Paul officer Aaron Bohlen, and the officer feared Murdock was going to shoot him and his partners, Bohlen wrote in a statement to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

Murdock said loudly, “Do it!” Bohlen added.

Bohlen said he fired three to four times and officer Lance Christianson reported he shot once. Murdock fell to the ground and Bohlen said he saw the handgun fall from his hand. It was still within reach of Murdock, and Christianson kicked the gun away.

A Belle Plaine sergeant radioed for an ambulance and an air ambulance helicopter.

Officers cleared in shooting

An autopsy found Murdock had a gunshot wound to the right chest, the back and the right arm. A BCA agent wrote that toxicology showed Murdock had alcohol and THC, which is in cannabis or marijuana, in his system. The amounts are not publicly known because the toxicology report was redacted.

Murdock’s DNA was found on the gun that police say he had in Belle Plaine. Testing ruled it out as the gun used in the homicide in St. Paul, Denning said. Officials have not found the gun used in the shooting.

The gun did not have a serial number, according to a report in the BCA file. Murdock was banned from possessing guns because of a 2013 felony burglary conviction.

Scott County Attorney Ron Hocevar announced in February that he determined the officers’ use of force was “necessary to protect these officers from death or great bodily harm” and they acted within the law.

April Murdock said she doesn’t believe the police statements that Seantrell Murdock was holding a gun. Body camera footage shows a handgun on the ground immediately after Murdock was shot; the view of what happened between him and the officers is not visible on video.

As for Seantrell Murdock’s innocence or guilt, “he can’t even speak for himself now,” his mother said.

Needed medication, mom says

Seantrell Murdock graduated from Shakopee High School. He had four children and was always “a provider for his kids,” his mother said in an interview with the Pioneer Press. He’d moved to Belle Plaine about nine years earlier because he wanted a safe place to raise his children.

They were living in a rental home, with April Murdock and her husband on one floor, and Seantrell Murdock on the other.

At the end of 2022 to the beginning of 2023, Seantrell Murdock tried LSD, April Murdock told the BCA. “People say that it opens you up for demons, I guess?” she said. “… That medicine just made him go overboard.”

Seantrell Murdock asked his mom to take him to the hospital in January 2023, telling her he was hearing voices.

“He went in freely at first,” her BCA statement said, but then he started fighting people. “I told them to keep him.”

Murdock put his hands around a nurse’s neck, threatened to kill hospital staff, and punched a security guard in the head and neck area, a court document said.

He “indicated he was scared of himself and he’d say he didn’t want to harm anyone and then shortly thereafter would state he wanted to kill others,” the document continued. It also said his mother told hospital staff he “had access to a firearm and she was fearful for her son’s safety.”

After Murdock began taking medications during his hospitalization, he was calm and cooperative with staff and willing to participate in out-patient chemical dependency treatment, medication and therapy, the document continued.

A petition for civil commitment was filed, but commitment was stayed for six months, concluding in August 2023, on various conditions — including that Murdock take prescribed medication and cooperate with Scott County Adult Mental Health case management.

Out of the hospital, Murdock did well, his mother said. He completed training to become an electrician. He was working as a crane operator in Plymouth.

But a couple of months before September 2024, “he was kinda feeling off,” April Murdock said. He asked for one of his mother’s prescription pills for anxiety. She told him, “Look, you need to go to your doctor and get medicine,” according to her BCA statement.

“They would not give him medicine,” April Murdock said. That was because Seantrell Murdock was told he needed to stop smoking marijuana. He said he would stop when he was prescribed medication.

“He basically tried to self-medicate himself” by smoking marijuana, April Murdock said.

‘I miss her joy’

At Kwok’s celebration of life last year, Pam Tucker said she worried for her friend: “Did she know? Was she afraid? Where did she go?”

Tucker said she believed, if Kwok could speak to them, she would say, “I am now with my Creator. … I am at peace. … Everywhere you’ve known me, I am there. Every corner you look for me, I am there.”

Kwok and Tucker were walking partners and Tucker said she imagined asking her friend on their next walk: “‘Carrie, so what is the meaning of it all?’ She would pause, pivot, catch my eye, a twinkle in hers, burst into laughter. I miss her joy.”

In Bill Kwok’s eulogy, he said the term “senseless” had been used over and over again about his mother’s death.

“How could something so horrific happen to such a kind and loving servant of God?” he asked.

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By Cara Anthony, KFF Health News

ST. LOUIS — Lying on top of an operating room table with his chest exposed, Larry Black Jr. was moments away from having his organs harvested when a doctor ran breathlessly into the room.

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“Get him off the table,” the doctor recalled telling the surgical team at SSM Health Saint Louis University Hospital as the team cleaned Black’s chest and abdomen. “This is my patient. Get him off the table.”

At first, no one recognized Zohny Zohny in his surgical mask. Then he told the surgical team he was the neurosurgeon assigned to Black’s case. Stunned by his orders, the team members pushed back, Zohny said, explaining that they had consent from the family to remove Black’s organs.

“I don’t care if we have consent,” Zohny recalled telling them. “I haven’t spoken to the family, and I don’t agree with this. Get him off the table.”

Black, his 22-year-old patient, had arrived at the hospital after getting shot in the head on March 24, 2019. A week later, he was taken to surgery to have his organs removed for donation — even though his heart was beating and he hadn’t been declared brain-dead, Zohny said.

Black’s sister Molly Watts said the family had doubts after agreeing to donate Black’s organs but felt unheard until the 34-year-old doctor, in his first year as a neurosurgeon, intervened.

Today, Black, now 28, is a musician and the father of three children. He still needs regular physical therapy for lingering health issues from the gun injury. And Black said he is haunted by what he remembers from those days while he was lying in a medically induced coma.

“I heard my mama yelling,” he recalled. “Everybody was there yelling my name, crying, playing my favorite songs, sending prayers up.”

He said he had tried to show everyone in his hospital room that he heard them. He recalled knocking on the side of the bed, blinking his eyes, trying to show that he was fighting for his life.

Organ transplants save a growing number of lives in the U.S. every year, with more than 48,000 transplants performed in 2024, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which oversees the nation’s transplant system. And thousands die awaiting donations that never come.

But organ donation has also faced ongoing criticism, including reports of patients showing alertness before planned organ harvesting. The results of a federal investigation into a Kentucky organ donation nonprofit, first disclosed by The New York Times in June, found that during a four-year period, medical providers had planned to harvest the organs of 73 patients despite signs of neurological activity. Those procedures ultimately didn’t take place, but federal officials vowed in July to overhaul the nation’s organ donation system.

“Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. “The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves.”

Even before this latest investigation, Black’s case showed Zohny that the organ donation system needed to improve. He was initially hesitant to talk to KFF Health News when contacted in July about Black. But Zohny said his patient’s story had stuck with him for years, highlighting that while organ donation must continue, little is understood about human consciousness. And determining when someone is dead is the critical but confusing question at play.

“There was no bad guy in this. It was a bad setup. There’s a problem in the system,” he said. “We need to look at the policies and make some adjustments to them to make sure that we’re doing organ donation for the right person at the right time in the right place, with the right specialists involved.”

LJ Punch, a former trauma surgeon who was not involved with the case but reviewed Black’s medical records for KFF Health News, questioned whether Black’s injury — from gunfire — possibly contributed to how he was treated. Young Black men like Larry Black are disproportionately victims of gun trauma in the United States, and research on such violence is scant. His experience exemplifies “the general neglect” of Black men’s bodies, Punch said.

“That’s what comes up for me,” Punch said. “Structurally, not individually. Not any one doctor, not any one nurse, not any one team. It’s a structural reality.”

The hospital declined to comment on the details of Black’s case. SSM Health’s Kim Henrichsen, president of Saint Louis University Hospital and St. Mary’s Hospital-St. Louis, said the hospital system approaches “all situations involving critical illness or end-of-life care with deep compassion and respect.”

Mid-America Transplant, the federally designated organ procurement organization serving the St. Louis region, does not comment on individual donor cases, according to Lindsey Speir, executive vice president for organ procurement. She did tell KFF Health News that her organization has walked away from cases when patients’ conditions change — though not as late as when they are in the operating room for harvesting.

“Let me be clear about that. It happens way before then,” she said. “It definitely happens multiple times a year where we get consent. The family has made the decision, we approach, we get consent, it’s all appropriate, and then a day or so later they improve and we’re like, ‘Whoa.’”

But Speir said the recent media stories about the nation’s donation system are prompting a lot of questions about a process that also does a lot of good.

“We’re losing public trust right now,” Speir said of the industry. “And we’re going to have to regain that.”

Blink Twice for a Chance at Life

It was a Sunday afternoon when gunshots rang out in downtown St. Louis. Black had been on his way to his sister’s apartment.

“I didn’t know I was shot at first,” Black said, sitting in his living room six years later. “I literally ran like a block or two away.”

He collapsed moments later, he said, crawling to the back door of a woman’s home, where he asked for help. He said he asked the woman to give him two large towels, one covered in rubbing alcohol and another soaked with hydrogen peroxide. He wrapped those towels around the back of his head.

When his sister Macquel Payne found him, he was lying on the ground near the leasing office of her apartment complex, a crowd gathered around him.

Before an ambulance took him to the hospital, Black told his sister not to worry about him.

“I’m hearing Larry say, ‘I’m good, sis,’” Payne recalled. “‘I’m OK.’”

Black said he went in and out of consciousness on the way to the hospital and once he was there.

“I got to hitting my hand on the side of the ICU bed,” Black said. “They was like: ‘That’s just the reaction, the side effects of the medicine. Ask him some questions.’”

Payne said she asked her brother to blink twice if he could remember his first pet, a dog named “Little Black” that looked like the Chihuahua from the Taco Bell commercials.

Black said he remembers blinking twice. His sisters remember the same.

Payne asked him another question. This time she wanted to know whether her brother recognized their family. Black said he blinked twice when he saw his mom and sister standing nearby.

Black said his sister then asked him “the main question” that everyone needed him to answer.

“She’s like, ‘If you want them to pull a plug, if you tired and you giving up, blink once,’” Black recalled. “‘If you still got some fight in you, blink more than once.’”

Black said he started blinking and hit the bed to let his family know that he was still with them.

The sisters said hospital staffers told them the movements were involuntary.

‘Not Right Now’

In a waiting room steps away from the hospital’s intensive care unit, a woman carrying brochures explained to Payne and the rest of the family that Black had identified himself as a possible organ donor on his ID.

The woman wanted to know whether the family wished to move forward with the process if Black died, Payne said.

“I remember my mom saying, ‘Not right now,’” Black’s sister recalled. “‘It’s kind of too soon.’”

Payne said the woman persisted.

“She was like, ‘Well, can I at least leave you some brochures or something?’” Payne recalled. “Then my mom got a little agitated because it felt like she was being, like, pushy.”

The family was already acquainted with the organ donation process. In 2007, Black’s teenage brother Miguel Payne drowned at a local lake. His organs were donated, Macquel Payne said, noting the family was told that his body parts and tissues helped multiple people.

“I believe in saving lives,” Payne said. “But don’t be pushy about it.”

Mid-America Transplant handles the organ transplant process for 84 counties in parts of Illinois, Arkansas, and Missouri, including St. Louis. Like the Kentucky organization, it is one of 55 federally designated nonprofits that facilitate organ donations throughout the country.

The nonprofit has never pressured a family into organ donation, Speir said. Registering to be an organ donor is legally binding, she said, but Mid-America has walked away from cases when families didn’t want to move forward.

She said her staff tries to dispel myths about organ donation and alleviate concerns. “We want to have the families leave with a positive experience,” Speir said.

Despite the family’s initial ambivalence, they ultimately consented to moving forward with donating Black’s organs. Watts said members of her brother’s care team had told the family that her brother was at “the end of the road.”

The family was told to prepare for Black’s “last walk of life,” Payne said. Also known as an honor or hero’s walk, the tradition honors the life of an organ donor before the harvesting process begins.

At the time, Payne said, she thought her brother still had a fighting chance. She asked the hospital staffers to take another look at him before he was wheeled down the hall.

“I’m like, ‘My brother’s in there tapping on the bed,’” Payne said. “They said, ‘That’s just his nerves.’ But I’m like, ‘No, something’s not right.’ It’s like he was too alert. He was letting us know: ‘Please don’t let them do this to me. I’m here. I can fight this.’ They were saying that’s what the medicine will do, it affects his nerves.”

After the family had agreed to move forward with the organ donation process, the two sisters said, an especially helpful member of Black’s medical team no longer treated them the same way. She became standoffish, they said.

“You could tell the dynamics had changed,” Watts said.

‘#RIPMyBrother’

The family put on blue jumpers for the walk of life. “We just walked around the floor, and everybody was, like, acknowledging him,” Payne said. “We just thought this was the end.”

A friend Black went to high school with filmed part of the ritual. In a short clip, Black is seen being wheeled on a stretcher down a hallway in the hospital. His eyes are half-open. People are crying.

False rumors then started to swirl outside the hospital.

Brianna Floyd said she went into shock when she heard that her friend was dead. She knew that Black had been shot in the head. But a few days earlier, a local newspaper had reported that he was in stable condition.

Floyd checked Facebook to see whether the news of his death was true. Her timeline was flooded with farewell posts for Black, so she decided to write one, too.

“I Love You So Much Brother,” Floyd wrote. “#RIPMyBrother. Never Thought I Would Say That.”

Black’s father rushed to the hospital when he heard a rumor that his son was being wheeled to the morgue.

“‘He’s gone,’” Lawrence Black Sr. recalled being told. “‘He’s going to the freezer now.’”

Black Sr. said he refused to believe that his son was dead. The thought was devastating. He had already experienced that kind of loss to gun violence.

“You wake up and nothing’s the same,” Black Sr. said. “The spirit is lingering for about a week, and you can feel it, you know?”

Overwhelmed with emotion, he prayed for his son to live.

‘I Can’t Kill Your Son’

Zohny, the neurosurgeon, said he heard an announcement about a “hero’s walk” over a loudspeaker in the hospital. He wasn’t familiar with the term, so he asked about it. Medical residents in the hospital explained and told Zohny that the walk was possibly for his patient Larry Black.

“No, that can’t be my patient,” Zohny said he told them. “I didn’t agree.”

That’s when Zohny called the ICU to check on Black’s status. A person who answered the phone told him that Black was being wheeled to an operating room, he said.

“This is my first year,” Zohny said. “Your first year out as a neurosurgeon is the riskiest time for you. Any mistakes, anything small, basically derails your career. So the moment this happened, my legs went weak and I was very nervous because, at the end of the day, your job as a doctor is to be perfect.”

KFF Health News, Zohny, and Punch all reviewed the medical files given to Black from his hospitalization. It’s not clear from the records what led to that moment.

“In every case, the patient must be declared legally dead by the hospital’s medical team before organ procurement begins. This is not negotiable,” Mid-America Transplant’s CEO and president, Kevin Lee, wrote in an Aug. 21 blog post on the nonprofit’s website, responding to the news and federal comments about the investigation centered in Kentucky. “Mid-America Transplant strictly follows all laws, regulations, and hospital protocols throughout the process.”

He said in a statement to KFF Health News that a person can be pronounced dead in two ways. A person is legally dead if their heart stops beating and they stop breathing, which is when donation after cardiac death can occur. A person can also become an organ donor if their brain, including the brain stem, has irreversibly ceased functioning, which is when brain death donation can occur.

“Every hospital has their own process in declaring both types of death,” Speir said in a statement. “Mid-America Transplant ensures hospitals follow their policies.”

But Black didn’t fall into either category, Zohny said. And, he said, Black hadn’t had what is known as a brain death exam.

Zohny said he immediately informed his chairman about the situation, then started running to the operating room. Black’s family was waiting in the hallway, unaware of the drama happening behind a set of closed silver doors.

Then Zohny emerged, pulling Black’s family into an empty operating room that was nearby.

“I remember he told my mama, ‘I can’t kill your son,’” Payne recalled. “She said, ‘Excuse me?’”

Zohny put an image of Black’s brain on a screen. Then he circled the part of his brain that was damaged. He explained that Black’s gunshot wound was something that he could possibly recover from, though he might need therapy. He asked the family whether they were willing to give Black more time to heal from the injury, instead of withdrawing care.

“In my opinion, no family would ever consent to organ donation unless they were given an impression that their family member had a very poor prognosis,” Zohny said. “I never had a conversation with the family about the prognosis, because it was too early to have that discussion.”

Zohny knew that he was taking a professional risk when he ran into the operating room.

“The worst-case scenario for me is that I lose my job,” he recalled thinking. “Worst-case scenario for him, he wrongfully loses his life.”

Later, Zohny said, a hospital worker who transported Black from the ICU to the operating room told Zohny that something had seemed off.

“I remember him looking at me and saying, ‘I’m so glad you stopped that,’” Zohny recalled. “And I said, ‘Why?’ And he said: ‘I don’t know. His eyes were open the whole time, and I just felt like he was looking at me. His eyes didn’t move, but it felt like he was looking at me.’”

‘Back From the Dead’

After Zohny’s intervention, Black was wheeled back to the ICU. Zohny said the medical team held back all medications that caused his sedation.

Black woke up two days later, Zohny said, and started speaking. Within a week, the neurosurgeon said, he was standing.

“I had to learn how to walk, how to spell, read,” Black said. “I had to learn my name again, my Social, birthday, everything.”

Zohny continued to care for Black during what remained of his 21 days in the hospital. During a follow-up appointment, he posed for a photo with Black and his older sister, Watts. Next to Zohny, Black is standing up, a brace on his leg.

“It’s a miracle that despite flawed policy we were able to save his life,” Zohny said. “It was an absolute miracle.”

Zohny, who was working as a fellow and assistant professor at the time, left Saint Louis University Hospital for another job later that year when his fellowship ended. He said Black’s story made him question what we know about consciousness.

He’s now working on a new method that quantifies consciousness. Zohny said it could possibly be used to help measure consciousness from brain signals, such as with an electroencephalogram, or EEG, a test that measures electrical activity in the brain. Zohny said his method still needs rigorous validation, so he recently started a medical research company called Zeta Analytica, separate from his work at the West Virginia University Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, which he’ll begin in October.

“We don’t understand the brain to the level that we should, especially with all of the technology we have now,” Zohny said.

Today, Black is trying to move forward. He said he has seizures if the bullet fragments in his head move around too much. He said he easily overheats because of the injury.

He doesn’t blame his family for their decision. But he questions the organ transplantation process. “It’s like they choose people’s destiny for them just because they have an organ donor ribbon on their ID,” Black said. “And that’s not cool.”

To help him process everything that happened to him in 2019, he makes music under the name BeamNavyLooney. “I am back from the dead,” he recently wrote in a song about his experience.

Earlier this year, Black celebrated the birth of another son, who was sleeping peacefully at home as Black recounted his story.

“He doesn’t really cry,” Black said. “He just makes noises.”

Black sat with a firearm within reach. He said he keeps the gun close to protect his family. It’s still hard for him to sleep at night. Nightmares about what happened — both on the street and in the hospital — keep him awake.

He said he no longer wants to be on the organ donor registry.

This project was supported by a fellowship from the Association of Health Care Journalists, with funding from The Joyce Foundation.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The fraud ran so deep that even Somali parents who might not have even entertained aspirations of scammed wealth were enticed to offer their children up for autism care in exchange for getting paid. A woman named Asha Farha Hassan has been charged with defrauding the Minnesota’s autism program for $14 million.

There is a temptation to call the $14 million a personal record, the 56-game hitting streak of fraud. She probably got a fist bump when she walked down the street. But Hassan is only the first person charged in the autism fraud. Her record could be broken. The U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Joe Thompson, said there will be others, not yet charged.

If you don’t feel betrayed yet, consider that Thompson said that fraud cases are a wholesale attack on Minnesota programs to the point where fraud has overtaken legitimate services.

Hassan, 28, whipped up a business called Smart Therapy, according to the charges. More than 300 of these businesses sprang up, most of them fake, we’re told. Hassan and her untrained young relatives recruited parents. No autism. Not a problem. According to the charges, Hassan paid parents a kickback of $300 to $1,200 if they agreed to participate. Hassan then billed the state and the cash rolled in. Some parents, catching the drift, threatened to take their kids to other “treatment” centers if they didn’t get a bigger kickback.

Autism fraud, food fraud, day care fraud, housing stabilization fraud. Billions of dollars in fraud – Thompson’s words, billions – and basically, he has just begun.

By the way, Hassan is allegedly a double-dipper fraudster. In 2021, Hassan claimed to be feeding 1,200 kids a day seven days a week and allegedly received $465,000 from the state. That might not have been enough to fatten her real estate portfolio in Kenya. She apparently didn’t even spend our stolen money in our state.

We have been more profoundly betrayed than at any time since the founding of the state. We work, we pay our bills and our taxes, we follow the law, maybe go to church on Sunday. And Minnesota government has betrayed us. There is no reason to have trust in the state or in any of the state agencies that we presumed were acting on our behalf. It’s crushing to lose that trust, and according to Thompson and his team, we are in line for more betrayal, maybe even a stolen amount that will break the 56-game fraud record.

Which brings us to our governor, Tim Walz. He is running for a third term. Why? Anybody with a sense of shame or embarrassment could not possibly look Minnesotans in the eye and claim he cares about what he calls working families. Why, it’s preposterous. These are his agencies that have broken the trust, his agency heads, his watch on deck. This is all on Walz and yet, absurdly, he wants a third term. His dereliction of duty could be considered malfeasance and disqualification from running.

Perhaps it isn’t that hard to figure out. He has been written off by the king makers who realize he doesn’t stand a chance on the national stage. He is a career politician. He’s too young to retire and live off his multiple pensions.

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What to do? I know. I’ll run against the president! He is cleverly taking advantage of how polarizing Donald Trump has been for the nation. In Minnesota, particularly, the Walz voter could not possibly turn against him for his incompetence that led to fraud and a broken trust. That would be tantamount to endorsing Trump.

Trump is a poorly matured fellow and wanders about with steamer trunks full of problems, but he has had absolutely nothing to do with fraud in Minnesota. If Walz fools you with his stump talk of Mar-a-Lago and Trump’s billionaire golfing pals, ask yourself what that has do with the financial ruin of this state.

Walz owns the betrayal and the broken trust. It’s ridiculous that he’s running for another term.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

By Aaron Bolton, KFF Health News

Biologist Grant Hokit came to this small meadow in the mountains outside Condon, Montana, to look for ticks. A hiking path crossed the expanse of long grasses and berry bushes.

As Hokit walked the path, he carried a handmade tool made of plastic pipes taped together to hold a large rectangle of white flannel cloth.

He poked fun at this “sophisticated” device, but the scientific survey was quite serious: He was sweeping the cloth over the shrubs and grass, hoping that “questing” ticks would latch on.

Along the summer trail, ticks dangle from blades of grass, sticking their legs out and waiting for a passing mammal.

“We got one,” Hokit said.

“So that came off of this sedge grass right here,” he said. “Simply pick them off with our fingers. We’ve got a vial that we pop them in.”

Biologist Grant Hokit drags a white cloth through brush outside Condon looking for ticks. These surveys help public health officials understand where ticks are in Montana and detect new species that have migrated on large mammals like deer. Hokit found deer ticks, which are known to carry Lyme disease, earlier this year in northeastern Montana. (Aaron Bolton/Montana Public Radio/KFF HEALTH NEWS/TNS)

Any captured ticks would go back to Hokit’s lab in Helena for identification. Most of them would probably be identified as Rocky Mountain wood ticks.

But Hokit also wanted to find out whether new species are making their way into the state.

As human-driven climate change makes winters shorter, ticks are spending less time hibernating and have more active months when they can hitch rides on animals and people. Sometimes the ticks carry themselves — and diseases— to new parts of the country.

Hokit found deer ticks for the first time in northeastern Montana earlier this year. Deer ticks are infamous for transmitting Lyme disease and can infect people with other pathogens.

Knowing a new species like the deer tick has arrived in Montana or other states is important for doctors.

Neil Ku is an infectious disease specialist at the Billings Clinic in eastern Montana. He said most patients don’t come in right after they get bitten by a tick. They usually show up later, when they start feeling sick from a tick-borne illness.

“Fever, some chills, they may just feel bad, similar to many infections we may encounter throughout the year,” he said.

It’s rare that patients connect a tick bite to those symptoms, and even more rare that they capture and keep the tick that bit them. Sorting out whether someone might have a tick-borne illness can be complicated.

Knowing what kinds of ticks are in the region will help doctors know that they might start encountering patients infected with new diseases after a tick bite, Ku said.

That’s partially why the state is on the hunt for new tick species.

“The more we know about what’s in Montana, the better we can inform our physicians, the better care you can receive,” said Devon Cozart, a zoonotic illness and vector-borne disease epidemiologist with the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services.

Cozart collects and tests the ticks from field surveys in Montana to see whether they are carrying any pathogens.

Whether a tick can get a human sick depends on the species, but the kind of mammal it feeds on also plays a role.

“Usually it’s a rodent that might be carrying, for example, Rocky Mountain spotted fever,” she said. “So, the tick will feed on that rodent, then will get the pathogen as well.”

Because the prevalence of a particular disease can vary in mammal populations, ticks in one part of the state could be more or less likely to get you sick. That’s also important information for medical providers, Cozart said.

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This kind of surveillance and testing isn’t happening in every county or state. A 2023 survey of nearly 500 health departments throughout the country found that roughly a quarter do some kind of tick surveillance.

Not all surveillance efforts are equal, said Chelsea Gridley-Smith, director of environmental health at the National Association of City and County Health Officials.

Field surveys can be expensive. For numerous local and state health departments, tick surveillance relies on a less expensive, more passive approach: Concerned patients, veterinarians, and doctors must collect and send in ticks for identification.

“It does provide a little information about what ticks are actually interacting with people and animals, but it doesn’t get into the weeds of how common ticks are in that area and how often do those ticks carry pathogens,” Gridley-Smith said.

She said more health departments want to start tick surveillance, but getting funding is hard — and might get harder as federal public health grants from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dry up.

Montana receives about $60,000 from a federal grant annually, but the bulk of that funding goes toward mosquito surveillance, which is more intensive and costly. What’s left funds trips into the field to look for ticks.

Hokit said he doesn’t have enough funding for his small team to survey everywhere he would like to in a state as large as Montana. That means he’s unable to monitor emerging populations of deer ticks as closely as he would like.

He found those new deer ticks in two Montana counties, but he doesn’t have enough data to determine whether they have begun reproducing there, establishing a local population.

In the meantime, Hokit uses data on climate and vegetation to make predictions about where deer ticks might thrive in the state. He has his eye on particular areas of western Montana, like the Flathead Valley.

He said that will help him and his team narrow down where to look next so they can let the public know when deer ticks — and the diseases they can carry — arrive.

This article is part of a partnership with NPR and Montana Public Radio

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.