DETROIT LAKES, Minn. — The felony burglary trial of a Minnesota state senator that was scheduled to start with jury selection on Monday in Becker County District Court will not proceed as originally planned.

Jury selection in the trial for Sen. Nicole Mitchell, DFL-Woodbury, was to begin at 8:30 a.m. Monday.

On Sunday, court officials issued a notice stating that instead of the start of jury selection, a hearing will be held at 9 a.m. Monday via Zoom.

A court official said it’s due to the weekend events in the Twin Cities, where two lawmakers were shot early Saturday morning.

Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed inside their Brooklyn Park home. Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were shot earlier in their Champlin home. They survived.

Police have said the Democratic lawmakers were targeted, and the shooter was impersonating a police officer. The suspect, 57-year-old Vance Luther Boelter, was arrested Sunday night near his home in rural Sibley County.

Mitchell’s lawyer said he could not comment about the continuance.

Mitchell is accused of burglarizing her stepmother’s house in Detroit Lakes in April 2024.

Mitchell told police officers she was retrieving items of a sentimental nature that belonged to her late father, included his cremated remains, court documents say.

Mitchell faces two felony burglary counts: first-degree burglary and possession of burglary or theft tools. She pleaded not guilty to the burglary charge.

Charges were brought against Mitchell during the 2024 legislative session.

Authorities said that around 4:45 a.m. on April 22, 2024, Detroit Lakes police were dispatched to the home of Mitchell’s stepmother for a report of a break-in.

Officers found Mitchell in a basement bathroom, dressed in black clothing, according to the complaint.

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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.