St. Olaf football player Matthew Lee was fatally shot inside a South St. Paul home early Friday after another man tried to rob the shooter, charges filed Tuesday say.

Terrell Anthony Ranzy, 19, of St. Paul, fired several shots when Keith Woodson Cox, 20, pulled out a gun, pointed it at Ranzy and said “I ain’t going to lie, I need you to give me all that (expletive),” referring to Ranzy’s gun, charges say.

Lee, a junior linebacker at the private liberal arts college in Northfield, was hit twice by the gunfire and died at the scene. Woodson Cox had gunshot wounds to his arms and torso and was rushed to the hospital.

A witness told police that Lee was an “innocent bystander,” according to a criminal complaint in Dakota County District Court charging Ranzy with second-degree unintentional murder, second-degree manslaughter and possession of a firearm by an ineligible person.

Lee was a 2023 South St. Paul High School graduate who went home to South St. Paul to visit his mother, grandfather and friends because the football team did not have a game Saturday, St. Olaf football coach James Kilian told the Pioneer Press on Friday.

Lee, an economics major, was a “great teammate. Friends with everybody on the team,” Kilian said. “Smiled. Always had a great attitude.”

Ranzy ran from the home in the 300 block of Second Avenue South after the shooting and was arrested about two hours later hiding in a shed three blocks away, the complaint says.

Ranzy had a first appearance on the charges Tuesday and remained jailed in lieu of $750,000, which was requested by the prosecution.

His attorney, assistant public defender Alex Vian, asked that he be released on $10,000 conditional bail, arguing that he was robbed at gunpoint and that he defended himself. He’s due back in court Sept. 25.

Hanging out

According to the complaint, officers responded to the scene about 3:45 a.m. Friday.

People outside of the house told officers an unresponsive man was in an upstairs bedroom. Officers tried to open the door, but Lee’s body was blocking it. Officers could not find a pulse and he was declared dead.

Woodson Cox was also in the bedroom with a tourniquet on his left arm.

A black Glock handgun was on a table in the room.

Officers were told there were several people in the home and in the bedroom at the time of the shooting. After speaking with witnesses, they learned the following, according to the complaint:

Woodson Cox, Ranzy, Lee and others were hanging out that evening and eventually went to the South St. Paul home around 3 a.m.

Terrell Anthony Ranzy (Courtesy of the Dakota County Sheriff’s Office)

In the bedroom, Woodson Cox and Ranzy each had a gun and were comparing them. Woodson Cox’s gun was a Glock 19 with a tan magazine. Ranzy’s gun was an “XD” with a black magazine.

Woodson Cox told Ranzy that he should always “keep one up top,” meaning keep a round in the chamber, the complaint states.

Woodson Cox and Lee went into a bathroom together next to the bedroom. While in the bathroom, Woodson Cox told Lee and a witness that he was going to rob Ranzy of his gun. Both Lee and the witness told Woodson Cox not to do it.

After leaving the bathroom, they returned to the bedroom at which time Woodson Cox pulled out his gun and tried robbing Ranzy of his gun. Ranzy fell backward onto the bed and fired his gun into the ceiling, then multiple times from a crouched position, hitting both Woodson Cox and Lee.

The witness said he saw both Woodson Cox and Ranzy fire their guns. Two people in the room jumped out of the window to avoid the gunfire.

Prohibited from possessing guns

In searching the bedroom, officers located 14 discharged casings from two guns.

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After the shooting, Ranzy fled the house, but came back a short time later. He wanted to retrieve his phone, but was not allowed back in and he left again.

Officers found him in the shed in the 500 block of First Avenue South. A search of the shed and the surrounding area did not turn up a firearm.

Ranzy is prohibited from possessing firearms because of a Jan. 31 conviction for threats of violence out of Ramsey County. Court records show he threatened to shoot a family member with a gun at their St. Paul home in July 2024. He was sentenced to three years’ probation.

Ranzy has been wanted since Jan. 9, when he failed to show up for an arraignment in Ramsey County on a misdemeanor citation for possession of an open bottle of alcohol at Sixth and Cedar streets in downtown St. Paul, court records show.

By KEVIN FREKING, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans unveiled Tuesday a stopgap spending bill that would keep federal agencies funded through Nov. 21, daring Democrats to block it knowing that the fallout would likely be a partial government shutdown that would begin Oct. 1, the start of the new budget year.

The bill would generally fund agencies at current levels, with a few exceptions, including an extra $88 million to boost security for lawmakers and members of the Supreme Court and the executive branch. The proposed boost comes as lawmakers face an increasing number of personal threats, with their concerns heightened by last week’s assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

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The House is expected to vote on the measure by Friday. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he would prefer the Senate take it up this week as well. But any bill will need some Democratic support to advance through the Senate, and it’s unclear whether that will happen.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries have been asking their Republican counterparts for weeks for a meeting to negotiate on the bill, but they say that Republicans have refused. Any bill needs help from at least seven Democrats in the Senate to overcome procedural hurdles and advance to a final vote.

“They can try and play the blame game, but their actions tell a different story,” Schumer said. “Their actions show they clearly want to shut things down because they don’t want to negotiate with Democrats.”

Republicans say it’s Democrats who are playing politics by insisting on addressing health coverage concerns as part of any government funding bill. In past budget battles, it has been Republicans who’ve been willing to engage in shutdown threats as a way to focus attention on their priority demands. That was the situation during the nation’s longest shutdown, during the winter of 2018-19, when President Donald Trump was insisting on federal funds to build the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

This time, however, Democrats are facing intense pressure from their base of supporters to stand up to Trump. They have particularly focused on the potential for skyrocketing health care premiums for millions of Americans if Congress fails to extend enhanced subsidies, which many people use to buy insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchange. Those subsidies were put in place during the COVID crisis, but are set to expire.

Johnson called the debate over health insurance tax credits a December policy issue, not something that needs to be solved in September.

“It’ll be a clean, short-term continuing resolution, end of story,” Johnson told reporters. “And it’s interesting to me that some of the same Democrats who decried government shutdowns under President Biden appear to have no heartache whatsoever at walking our nation off that cliff right now. I hope they don’t.”

By DAVID BAUDER, AP Media Writer

Charlie Kirk’s mastery of social media was key to his rise as an influence in conservative politics. So the extent to which his death and its aftermath have played out on those forums shouldn’t come as a surprise.

In a microcosm of life today, social media is where Americans have gone to process last week’s killing in Utah and is the chief tool his supporters are using to police those they feel aren’t offering proper respect. Investigators are probing the time the man accused of killing Kirk, Tyler Robinson, spent in the “dark corners of the internet” — anti-social media, if you will — leading up to when he allegedly pulled the trigger.

On the other side of the world, as the Kirk story preoccupied Americans, Nepal reeled from a spasm of violence that erupted when the government tried to ban social media platforms.

All of this is forcing a closer look at the technologies that have changed our lives, how they control what we see and understand through algorithms, and the way all the time we spend on them affects our view of the world.

Cox emerges as powerful spokesman against social media

Utah’s governor, Republican Spencer Cox, believes “cancer” isn’t a strong enough word to describe social media. “The most powerful companies in the history of the world have figured out how to hack our brains, get us addicted to outrage … and get us to hate each other,” Cox said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, urged Americans via social media to “pull yourself together, read a book, get some exercise, have a whiskey, walk the dog or make some pasta or go fishing or just do anything other than let this algo pickle your brain and ruin your soul.”

Chilling videos of Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination immediately overwhelmed sites like X, TikTok and YouTube, and companies are still working to contain their spread. Confrontational material and conspiracy theories are pushed into social media feeds because they do precisely what they’re designed to do — keep people on the platforms for longer periods of time.

“I do think we’re in a moment here,” said Laura Edelson, a Northeastern University professor and expert on social media algorithms. “Our country is being digitally mediated. Where we interact with other people, how we interact with broader society, that is more and more happening over feed algorithms. This is the most recent in a long line of ways that society has been changed by media technology.”

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Divisive content and the proliferation of the video of Kirk’s death may not have been the goal but are the direct result of decisions made to maximize profits and cut back on content moderation, Edelson said.

“I don’t think there are people twirling their mustaches saying how great it is that we’ve divided society, except the Russian troll farms and, more and more, the Chinese troll farms,” she said.

X owner Elon Musk posted on his site this past week that while discourse can become negative, “it’s still good there is a discussion going.” Conservative media star Ben Shapiro, who considered Kirk a friend, admired how Kirk was willing to go to different places and talk to people who disagreed with him, a practice all too rare in the social media era.

“How social media works is a disaster area, fully a disaster area,” Shapiro said in an interview with Bari Weiss on a Free Press podcast. “There’s no question it’s making the world a worse place — and that’s not a call for censorship.”

How people act on social media is a bipartisan problem, said Shapiro. The most pervasive one is people who use the third-person plural — “they” are doing something to “us,” he said. That’s been the case when many people discuss Kirk’s death, although the shooter’s motives haven’t become clear and there’s no evidence his actions are anything other than his own.

Collecting inflammatory posts from both sides

The liberal MeidasTouch media company has collected inflammatory social posts by conservatives, particularly those who suggest they’re at “war.” Meanwhile, several conservatives have combed social media for posts they consider negative toward Kirk, in some cases seeking to get people fired. The Libs of TikTok site urged that a Washington state school district be defunded because it refused to lower flags to half staff.

GOP Rep. Randy Fine of Florida asked people to point out negative Kirk posts from anyone who works in government, at a place that receives public funding or is licensed by government — a teacher or lawyer, for instance. “These monsters want a fight?” he wrote on X. “Congratulations, they got one.”

A Washington Post columnist, Karen Attiah, wrote Monday that she was fired for a series of BlueSky posts that expressed little sympathy for Kirk. But she wrote on Substack that “not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them.” A Post spokeswoman declined to comment.

So much of what people use to talk about politics — algorithmically driven social media sites and cable television — is designed to pull Americans apart, said James Talarico, a Democratic state lawmaker in Texas who recently announced a bid for the U.S. Senate. “We’ve got to find our way back to each other because that’s the only way we can continue this American experiment,” he said on MSNBC.

Among the most persistent examples of those divisions are the lies and misinformation about elections that have spread for years through online social channels. They have undermined faith in one of the country’s bedrock institutions and contributed to the rage that led supporters of President Donald Trump to violently storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Whether meaningful change is possible remains an open question. Nepal’s unrest illustrated the dangers of government involvement: Social media sites were shut down and users protested, suggesting it had been a way to stop criticism of government. Police opened fire at one demonstration, killing 19 people.

Persuading social media sites to change their algorithms is also an uphill battle. They live off attention and people spending as much time as possible on them. Unless advertisers flee for fear of being associated with violent posts, there’s little incentive for them to change, said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at EMarketer.

Young people in particular are becoming aware of the dangers of spending too much time on social media, she said.

But turn their phones off? “The reality of the situation,” Enberg said, “is that there’s a limit to how much they can limit their behavior.”

Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York and Barbara Ortutay in San Francisco contributed to this report. David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some Democratic senators say they are deeply concerned that a Pentagon plan to allow military lawyers to work as temporary immigration judges will violate a ban on using service members for law enforcement and affect the military justice system.

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The letter, sent to the military services and provided to The Associated Press, comes two weeks after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved sending up to 600 military lawyers to the Justice Department to serve as temporary immigration judges. It is part of the steps the Trump administration has taken to use the military in broader ways than previously seen, particularly in its immigration crackdown, including sending the National Guard into American cities and deploying active duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border.

“These military officers would serve under the command and control of the Attorney General and would execute administrative determinations at the direction of the Attorney General,” according to the letter signed by 12 Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee. It added that “these actions are inherently law enforcement actions that may not be performed by members of the armed forces.”

“We remain extremely disturbed about the impacts on readiness of using military personnel to perform what are traditionally Department of Justice functions,” the letter says.

The nation’s immigration courts — with a backlog of about 3.5 million cases — have become a key focus of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration enforcement efforts. Since Trump returned to office, dozens of immigration judges have been fired, while others have resigned or taken early retirement.

The senators’ letter, sent to the offices of the top military lawyers for the four services on Monday, is asking the Pentagon to say where the roughly 600 lawyers will be coming from and for insight into what legal analysis the military has conducted into whether the move would violate the Posse Comitatus Act. That law prevents the military from conducting law enforcement outside of extreme emergencies.

A Pentagon memo that described the plan said the lawyers should not be detailed for longer than half a year. The memo also showed that Pentagon officials were cognizant of the possibility for conflict with that law and said the Justice Department would be responsible for ensuring that the military lawyers do not violate it.

The Democratic senators said they were “deeply concerned” that pulling those lawyers away would have an impact on service members who are going through the military’s judicial system.

“These reassignments come at a time only shortly after Congress completely overhauled how the military investigates and prosecutes serious ‘covered’ criminal offenses … by establishing the Offices of Special Trial Counsel (OSTCs) in each of the Services,” the letter read.

Those offices were set up by Congress in 2022 as part of an effort to reform the military justice system by moving decisions on the prosecution of serious military crimes, including sexual assault, to independent military attorneys, taking that power away from victims’ commanders.

The offices began taking cases at the end of last year.

The letter asks the Pentagon what it will do to “preserve the OSTC’s progress in building specialized trial capacity” and what the services will do to “ensure that diversion of OSTCs, trial counsels, and defense counsels does not create delays or diminish quality in court-martials.” The senators say that the plan is a demonstration of how “the Trump administration views skilled personnel as pawns to be traded between agencies, rather than as professionals essential to their core missions, in order to advance misguided immigration policies.”