Surveillance footage captured an attempted murder, according to charges unsealed Sunday: A man wearing a mask, a blue shirt and police-style tactical vest with a badge knocked on a door in Champlin and announced himself as a police officer. He then entered the house and shot Minnesota Sen. John Hoffman and his wife.

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office also charged Vance Luther Boelter, who was arrested Sunday night after a two-day search, with the murders of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their Brooklyn Park home.

Boelter, of Green Isle, Minn., in Sibley County, was charged Saturday, the day of the shootings.

“Boelter exploited the trust our uniforms are meant to represent,” Minnesota Department of Public Safety Commissioner Bob Jacobson said Sunday night. “That betrayal is deeply disturbing to those of us who wear the badge with honor and responsibility.”

The criminal complaint, unsealed after Boelter was taken into custody, gives the following information:

Champlin police responded at 2:05 a.m. Saturday after a 911 caller reported a masked person came to their door and shot their parents. Police found John and Yvette Hoffman injured inside. They both remain hospitalized and are recovering.

Video footage from outside the residence showed a Ford sport-utility vehicle with police-style lights parked in the driveway. The video also captured a man dressed to look like an officer walking to the door, shooting and then fleeing in his vehicle.

After Brooklyn Park police learned about the shooting, because one of the victims in Champlin serves as a state legislator, “police proactively sent patrol officers” to Hortman’s Brooklyn Park home.

Officers arrived about 3:35 a.m. and saw the Ford SUV with police-style lights. They “immediately saw (Boelter), still dressed as a police officer, shoot an adult man … through the open door of the home,” the complaint said.

Police exchanged gunfire with the suspect, identified as Boelter. He fled inside the residence before escaping the area.

Officers found Melissa and Mark Hortman mortally wounded in their home.

Police searched Boelter’s vehicle, which was registered to him, and found at least three AK-47 rifles, a 9mm handgun, and a list of names and addresses of other public officials. In a canvass of the area, police located a ballistic vest, a disassembled 9mm firearm, a mask and a gold police-style badge.

Boelter was listed as the purchaser for at least four of the firearms that were found.

Investigators spoke “with a person familiar” with Boelter who identified him as the man on the Champlin residence surveillance footage.

The county attorney’s office charged Boelter with two counts of intentional second-degree murder, not premediated, and two counts of attempted murder.

Law enforcement arrested Boelter Sunday night in Sibley County. The county attorney’s office is seeking bail of $5 million.

It wasn’t immediately known when Boelter would make his first court appearance or whether he was represented by an attorney.

State law enforcement is working with federal law enforcement, who are examining whether additional charges should be brought at the federal level, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans said Sunday night.

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DULUTH — Researchers studying blue-green algae blooms in the Duluth-Superior Harbor have pinpointed the cyanobacteria species responsible for the bloom’s toxins in what the Minnesota Sea Grant, which supported the research, called a “breakthrough discovery.”

By sequencing DNA from a bloom near Barker’s Island in Superior last fall, researchers were able to link the toxins to Microcystis aeruginosa, a cyanobacterial species. Knowing this, they hope to better understand, detect and predict when a bloom might occur, or even trace the blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, to a source higher up the St. Louis River Estuary.

This species of cyanobacteria can create toxins that are harmful to humans and animals, and “chokes out” other species in a water ecosystem, said Abby Smason, a water resources science graduate student at the University of Minnesota Duluth and member of the research team.

“This is the first time we’ve kind of been able to make that one-to-one connection of: There’s this genome for this species, and it’s in the harbor, and it’s in this spot where there was a bloom, and it also has this gene that it would need to make toxins,” Smason, who collected the sample, told the News Tribune.

It’s the same species that regularly forms harmful algae blooms in Lake Erie, even prompting the city of Toledo, Ohio, in 2014 to order residents not to use their water for nearly three days after algae entered the water system’s intake.

“This organism does have the potential of wreaking some havoc,” said Cody Sheik, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Large Lakes Observatory, who led the research team with Chris Filstrup, an applied limnologist at the University of Minnesota’s Natural Resources Research Institute.

Sheik said the area near Barker’s Island, which includes a public swimming beach, has become “kind of a hot spot for blooms every year,” but it’s been hard to quantify — the blooms come and go quickly.

“It does seem like they are becoming more prevalent, and maybe even a little bit more intense,” Sheik said. “It seems like it’s going to be a growing problem that we’re going to have to deal with here for the next however many years.”

However, anything found in the harbor, so far, has been below Minnesota and U.S. drinking water standards, he said.

Sheik said that at high enough concentrations, the toxins can kill pet dogs within hours and can affect a person’s liver or get into their lungs. Concentrations of what has been found now might cause some swimmers’ itch, he said.

Since the first confirmed blue-green algae bloom on Lake Superior in 2012 — after a massive rainstorm across the region loaded the lake with nutrients from runoff — several additional blooms have been observed. But they have so far been caused by other strains of cyanobacteria, not the Microcystis aeruginosa identified as the source of toxins in the Duluth-Superior Harbor.

But the harbor ultimately flows into Lake Superior. And with climate change causing warmer waters, less ice cover and additional, heavier rain events that wash nutrients cyanobacteria feed on into the lake, researchers are keeping a close eye on the lake.

“Conditions aren’t ideal for many of these strains to really propagate at high frequency, but as the lake continues to change, are conditions going to be better and better for these organisms where they can start outcompeting other things within the lake itself and making these toxic blooms?” Filstrup said.

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Back in the harbor and the St. Louis River Estuary, the researchers hope to pursue additional testing and monitoring, potentially allowing them to predict when conditions are right for blooms.

And knowing the exact species producing these toxins could help them find where in the estuary they are developing.

“If we figure that out, then we might be able to start thinking about ways of remediating,” Sheik said.

By MORGAN LEE

EL PASO, Texas (AP) — U.S. troops have begun directly detaining immigrants accused of trespassing on a recently designated national defense zone along the southern U.S. border, in an escalation of the military’s enforcement role, authorities said Wednesday

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U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Chad Campbell described in detail the first detentions by troops last week of three immigrants accused of trespassing in a national defense area near Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

Those migrants were quickly turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and are now among more than 1,400 migrants to have been charged with illegally entering militarized areas along that border, under a new border enforcement strategy from President Donald Trump’s administration.

Troops are prohibited from conducting civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil under the Posse Comitatus Act. But an exception known as the military purpose doctrine allows it in some instances.

Authorities “noticed three individuals crossing the protective barrier into the United States,” Campbell said. “A Department of Defense response went to interdict those three individuals, told them to sit down. … In a matter of three minutes, border patrol agents came in to apprehend. So that three minutes is that temporary detention” by the military.

Trump has designated two national military defense areas along the southern U.S. border for New Mexico and a 60-mile stretch of western Texas, from El Paso to Fort Hancock, while transferring much of the land from the Interior Department to oversight by the Department of Defense for three years.

The Trump administration plans eventually to add more militarized zones along the border, a military spokesman said Wednesday at a news conference in El Paso.

“We have been very clear that there will be additional National Defense Areas across the southern border,” said Geoffrey Carmichael, a spokesperson for an enforcement task force at the southern border. “I won’t speculate to where those are going to be.”

Proponents of the militarized zones, including federal prosecutors, say the approach augments traditional efforts by Customs and Border Protection and other law enforcement agencies to secure the border.

“These partnerships and consequences exist so that we can promote the most humane border environment we’ve ever had,” El Paso sector Border Patrol Chief Agent Walter Slosar said. “We are dissuading people from entering the smuggling cycle … to make sure that smugglers cannot take advantage of individuals who are trying to come into the United States.”

Defense attorneys — and judges in some instances — are pushing back against the novel application of national security charges against immigrants who enter through those militarized zones — and carry a potential sentence of 18 months in prison on top of a possible six-month sentence for illegal entry.

A judge in New Mexico has dismissed more than 100 national security charges against immigrants, finding little evidence that immigrants knew about the national defense areas. Those migrants still confronted charges of illegal entry to the U.S.

In Texas, a Peruvian woman who crossed the U.S. border illegally was acquitted of unauthorized access to a newly designated militarized zone in the first trial under the Trump administration’s efforts.

U.S. Attorney Justin Simmons, who oversees western Texas, vowed to press forward with more military trespassing charges.

“We’re gonna keep going forward on these NDA charges,” Simmons said. “We are gonna still bring them, we may win on them, we may not. … At the end of the day, you are not going to be allowed to stay in this country if you enter this country illegally.”

Greater military engagement at the border takes place at the same time dozens of mayors from across the Los Angeles region banded together Wednesday to demand that the Trump administration stop the stepped-up immigration raids that have spread fear across their cities and sparked protests across the U.S.

Trump has authorized the deployment of an additional 2,000 National Guard members to respond to immigration protests in LA. That directive brings the total number of Guard put on federal orders for the protests to more than 4,100. The Pentagon had already deployed about 700 Marines to the protests to the city.