A Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension unit is pairing up agents with local law enforcement to focus on high-level violent crime, the agency announced Monday.

The goals are to assist local agencies in finding and arresting people who are repeat offenders and have felony warrants, along with targeting “guns that are flowing into our communities and then the related narcotics trafficking that is very much interrelated to the violent crime that we see,” said BCA Superintendent Drew Evans.

The Violent Crime Reduction Unit started in January and grew from an earlier effort called the Violence Crime Reduction Support Initiative.

The BCA launched that initiative in April 2022 “with a goal to assist some of our local partners that were coping with a spike in violent crime and staffing shortages, in particular the city of Minneapolis,” Evans said.

Between April 2022 and December 2023, while working with Minneapolis and St. Paul police, Hennepin County sheriff’s office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and other law enforcement, the initiative made 1,384 arrests and confiscated 653 firearms, 145,070 fentanyl pills and 220 pounds of methamphetamine, according to the BCA.

The BCA provided agents, analysts, crime scene personnel and scientists to assist with pursuing cases against “repeat violent offenders who were engaged in shootings, violent crime, gun trafficking and related crimes,” Evans said.

New funding, new unit

In last year’s legislative session, lawmakers provided one-time funding of $15 million for four years to reimburse local law enforcement agencies taking part in the new Violent Crime Reduction Unit, so they can backfill at their departments and aren’t short staffed. Ongoing costs will be about $12 million per year.

When the BCA started the earlier initiative, they pulled “agents and scientists from other really important work that we’re doing, including our homicide unit, some of our large-scale narcotics work that we’re doing,” Evans said. “This allows us now to fund the agents full time and then we can go back to that other work that we had to pause.”

The funding allows for a centralized location in Maplewood where the unit will work. About 30 people, including both officers and civilians, will work in the unit.

The staff will include 14 BCA agents, two criminal intelligence analysts, two crime victim/witness coordinators and 11 taskforce officers from a dozen local law enforcement agencies, said Jake May, the BCA special agent in charge of the new unit who also led the previous initiative.

The agencies that will have officers and deputies assigned include the Ramsey and Anoka County sheriff’s offices and the Maplewood, Roseville, North St. Paul, Bloomington, Fridley, St. Louis Park, Columbia Heights, Crystal, Brooklyn Park and Robbinsdale police departments.

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While St. Paul police are not part of the new unit, they work on the Ramsey County Violent Crime Enforcement Team and have their own investigators focusing on narcotics, gun crimes and shootings, according to a police spokesman. They also work together with other agencies.

The Violent Crime Reduction Unit has a K-9, the BCA’s first firearms-detection police dog that’s trained to sniff out gunshot residue “and often helps the team find crucial evidence,” May said.

“We want the people out there — the repeat offenders, the people who don’t care who they hurt, who gets caught in the crossfire, or where their drugs end up — to know that they are the ones we are targeting, that we’re going to come after them,” May said.

‘Intelligence-led approach’

The funding allowed the BCA laboratory to add two forensic scientists. Analysis of firearms and ballistics evidence, along with DNA testing to determine who handled guns, will “provide answers more quickly” to the people working in the VCRU, Evans said.

The aim is an “intelligence-led approach to identifying those individuals that are causing the most harm in our communities, in particular, those that are committing shootings and trafficking firearms,” Evans said.

The new unit, while working with local law enforcement, has made 112 arrests, confiscated 66 firearms and seized 2,700 fentanyl pills and more than nine pounds of methamphetamine and other drugs like cocaine and heroin since January. The numbers aren’t apples-to-apples comparisons of the work of the previous unit, and the new unit expects the tempo of its work will increase as they get established, train in local partner members and set up their new work space, according to the BCA.

The goal is to get back to pre-2019 levels for crime, Evans said. Crime in Minnesota “still remains elevated, even though we’re going in the right direction. … It’s still important that we now double down on those efforts to make sure that we really continue to concentrate on those relatively few number of people that are committing a lot of harm in our communities.”

The new unit may respond to an incident if it’s connected to a case they are working, but they don’t respond to typical daily police calls, according to the BCA.

The VCRU is primarily focused on the metro area because about 4 million of the state’s 5.7 million residents live in the Twin Cities area, but it is a statewide team.

“As they experience surges in Greater Minnesota … this team will be available to assist them,” Evans said.

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A second man has been charged in the Minneapolis shooting of an off-duty Eagan and Eden Prairie firefighter who prosecutors say was caught in the crossfire between two groups that exchanged more than 60 rounds of gunfire.

Dallas Antonio Villarreal-Griffin, who was wounded in the shootout, faces aiding and abetting first-degree riot resulting in death in connection with the May 5 shooting of Joseph Charles Johns behind the former Whiskey Junction bar in the 900 block of Cedar Avenue South.

Joseph Johns (Courtesy of the Eden Prairie Fire Department)

Based on a witness account, Johns was directing traffic when the gunfight erupted, catching him in the crossfire, according to the criminal complaints. He was shot once by a bullet fired from a 9mm handgun, hitting him in the chest.

Johns, 40, was a full-time firefighter with Eagan since 2020. He was also a duty call firefighter part-time in Eden Prairie, where he lived, since 2015.

Villarreal-Griffin, 26, of Columbia Heights, was arrested by Minneapolis police on Friday and charged the same day in Hennepin County District Court. He appeared before a judge Monday and remained jailed in lieu of $1 million bail.

Villarreal-Griffin, who was shot in the leg and hospitalized, admitted to firing a 9mm “ghost gun” into a group, the charges say. Ghost guns are privately made and untraceable because they don’t have serial numbers.

“(Villarreal-Griffin) was made aware that he is one of the individuals who may have fired the shot which killed (Johns),” the complaint against him says.

Marquise Trevone Hammonds-Ford, of Monticello, was arrested and charged May 9 for his alleged role in Johns’ death. The shootout began when the 28-year-old fired rapid gunshots into the air from a 10mm handgun modified into an automatic weapon, according to the complaint charging him with aiding and abetting first-degree riot resulting in death.

According to the complaints:

Minneapolis police responded to the area around 12:30 a.m. after a call of a shooting with two people injured. Johns was pronounced dead at Hennepin County Medical Center less than an hour later.

Officers spoke to witnesses and learned that prior to the shooting hundreds of people had gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of a motorcycle club.

Officers at the scene collected 63 discharged cartridge casings, which were found in clusters on both sides of the street in front of the bar.

Evidence, including video surveillance, showed that Johns was shot as two groups exchanged gunfire from opposite sides of the street.

When the shooting stopped, Hammonds-Ford and others sped off and dropped off an “injured associate,” later identified as Villarreal-Griffin, at HCMC.

Dallas Antonio Villarreal-Griffin and Marquise Trevone Hammonds-Ford (Courtesy of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office)

Forensic testing showed that shots were fired by seven guns: six 9mm firearms and one 10mm firearm.

Investigators created a map of the crime scene that showed a cluster of four 10mm cartridge casings in the spot where Hammonds-Ford fired his initial barrage of gunfire.

In his interview with police, Villarreal-Griffin said he did not know what happened to his ghost gun because he left it in the car when he was dropped off.

“The investigation into other suspects responsible for the death of (Johns) is ongoing,” the complaints say.

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For a decade or more, organizers of the Lower Phalen Creek Project eyed the century-old Standard Oil warehouse as a potential home for a new nature and cultural interpretative center within the 27-acre Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary at the base of Dayton’s Bluff. And then came the realization that the dream was not to be, at least not in that facility.

The walls came crashing down off the vacant but longstanding warehouse in 2015, as the nonprofit’s organizers — including then-executive director Dan McGuiness — decided the aged building was too pricey to preserve and retrofit into a public-facing nature center. Its demolition that year ignited hope that a new $5 million structure could be built in its place.

With the pandemic playing no small role in disrupting planning, the past nine years have been full of fundraising stops and starts. Nevertheless, St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and a who’s who of city, county, parks and indigenous leaders came together Monday afternoon for the groundbreaking of the future Wakan Tipi Center, a $14.3 million, city-owned nature center slated to open its doors in late 2025 beneath the Kellogg Boulevard/Third Street bridge.

Preservation of nature, culture

To say that plans had evolved in the past 20 years or more would be putting it lightly.

The Lower Phalen Creek Project was renamed last year Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi. It was refashioned as a native-led nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of nature and culture within the area surrounding Wakan Tipi, a sacred cave that many St. Paul residents grew up referring to as Carver’s Cave after the European explorer who befriended the native community there.

The nonprofit will be the building’s primary tenant.

The 7,500-square-foot center, which will be constructed by Versacon contractors off Fourth and Commercial street, is intended to showcase the history, language and values of the Dakota tribes with an exhibit hall, classrooms, ceremony space, a community gathering area, teaching kitchen and teaching gardens.

Funding

A capital campaign launched in earnest in 2018, raising more than $6.5 million from the state, as well as upwards of 60 grants, with some approaching $1 million or more from the Bush Foundation, the Katherine B. Andersen Fund of the St. Paul Foundation, the Margaret A. Cargill philanthropies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Fundraising for the building and gardens is complete, said Maggie Lorenz, executive director of Wakan Tipi Awanyankapi, but the goal remains to raise another $2 million or so for a second phase of construction once the Kellogg Boulevard/Third Street bridge is replaced in 2027. That second phase would entail landscaping, trail connections, expansion of the permanent parking lot, construction of a multi-vehicle garage that would house a youth transportation van, a truck and a utility terrain vehicle to enable land stewardship.

Katherine Beane, who chairs the nonprofit and directs the Minnesota Museum of American Art, said she appreciated the willingness of the founders of the Lower Phalen Creek Project to transition to a Dakota-oriented initiative.

“They were allies who were willing to let go and make sure the decision-making and the direction would be under the leadership of the community,” she said. “At the point our organization became a native-led organization, we knew it was going to be a success.”

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