Slain Minnesota lawmaker becomes 1st woman to lie at state capitol
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(MINNESOTA) — Minnesotans are lining up at the state capitol on Friday to honor a slain lawmaker and her husband as their accused killer made a brief appearance in court.
Melissa Hortman is the first woman to lie in state, according to the Minnesota House of Representatives.
Next to the Hortmans was their golden retriever, Gilbert, who was wounded in the attack and later had to be euthanized, officials said.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and first lady Gwen Walz are among those paying their respects.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris will attend the couple’s private funeral on Saturday, according to a source familiar with Harris’ plans.
Harris spoke to the Hortmans’ two children, Sophie and Colin, in the last week “to express her deep condolences and offer her support,” the source said.
Meanwhile, the Hortmans’ alleged killer, Vance Boelter, who faces federal charges including stalking and state charges including first-degree murder, briefly appeared in federal court on Friday.
Boelter alleged the conditions in jail have kept him from sleeping for 12 to 14 days, according to Minneapolis ABC affiliate KSTP. Boelter claimed the doors are slammed incessantly, the lights are always and that he sleeps on a mat without a pillow, KSTP reported. He also allegedly said an inmate next to him spreads feces, KSTP reported.
The judge agreed to push back Boelter’s hearing to July 3, according to KSTP. Boelter has not entered a plea.
Boelter is accused of shooting and killing the Hortmans at their home in Brooklyn Park and shooting and wounding Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, at their house in nearby Champlin in the early hours of June 14, authorities said.
Boelter, 57, allegedly showed up to their doors, impersonating a police officer and wearing a realistic-looking latex mask to carry out his “political assassinations,” prosecutors said.
Investigators recovered a list of about 45 elected officials in notebooks in his car, according to prosecutors. Two other lawmakers were spared the night of the shootings, officials said.
ABC News’ Ahmad Hemingway and Brittany Shepherd contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. State Department has announced that it’s suspending the issuance of all visitor visas for people from the war-torn Gaza Strip, including children in need of urgent medical care.
“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” the State Department wrote in a post on X on Saturday.
Based on State Department statistics from January 2025 through the end of May 2025, a total of 3,804 class B1/B2 visas have been issued for individuals with Palestinian Authority travel documents. While the State Department numbers do not specify the purpose of the trips nor how many of the 3,804 visas issued were class B1 or B2, individuals seeking to enter the United States for tourism or medical treatment fall under the B2 visa class, while B1 visas cover business travel.
An ABC News request for comment sent to the State Department did not immediately receive a response.
Describing one of the latest transfers of Palestinians seeking treatment in the U.S., HEAL Palestine, an American nonprofit organization, announced that 11 severely injured Palestinian children, along with 26 accompanying family members, successfully crossed from Gaza into Jordan on July 30, 2025, in coordination from the World Health Organization and were planning to enter the U.S. in August.
“Many of the children suffer from critical injuries such as amputations, severe burns, and trauma-related complications – conditions that Gaza’s collapsed health system can no longer treat,” according to HEAL Palestine.
A memorial is seen on the desk of DFL State Rep. Melissa Hortman in the House chambers at the Minnesota State Capitol/Steven Garcia/Getty Images
(GREEN ISLE, Minn.) — Vance Boelter was preoccupied with societal problems and how he could fix them to serve the greater good, according to some of his previous writings and the man who worked with Boelter for more than a decade doing web design for a series of his projects.
Before allegedly carrying out a “political assassination” on Saturday, Boelter was “clearly very religious, very passionate,” and “devout, and sincere in his beliefs,” said Charlie Kalech, CEO of the web design firm J-Town, commissioned by Boelter. But at that time, Boelter appeared to show no signs of the violent extremism of which he’s now accused, Kalech said.
Boelter is charged with killing Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and wounding Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife. Allegedly posing as a police officer over Father’s Day weekend, authorities said Boelter “shot them in cold blood” in an alleged early-morning rampage that launched a two-day manhunt.
However, in the preceding years, Boelter seemed like a hard worker striving to make his ideas real, and sometimes, struggling to make ends meet. His fervent personality frothed with big, civic-minded ideas on how to “make the world a better place,” Kalech said. In the professional relationship they had, Boelter was clearly “idealistic.”
“I think he sincerely believed in the projects that we worked on, that he was acting for the greater good,” Kalech told ABC News. “I certainly never got the impression he saw himself as a savior. He just thought of himself as a smart guy who figured out the solution to problems, and it’s not so difficult – so let’s just do it. Like a call to action kind of person.”
Most of those grand-scale projects never came to fruition, and the last time Kalech said he had contact with Boelter was May 2022. But in planning documents and PowerPoint presentations shared with ABC News, which Kalech said Boelter wrote for the web design, Boelter detailed lengthy proposals that expressed frustration with what he saw as unjust suffering that needed to be stopped. Some of those projects were also sweeping, to the point of quixotic — even for the deepest-pocketed entrepreneur.
Boelter first reached out to Kalech’s firm for a book he had written, “Revoformation,” which Kalech took to be a mashup between “revolution” and “reformation.” It’s also the name of the ministry Boelter had once tried to get off the ground, according to the organization’s tax forms.
“It seemed to me like maybe he volunteered more than what was good for him. In other words, he gave too much away instead of worrying about earning money, because he didn’t always have money,” Kalech said. “It was never clear to me if the ministry really existed. Are there congregants? Is there a constituency? I don’t know. Or was it like something in his head that he was trying to make? That was never clear to me.”
Kalech recalled that Boelter chose his firm for the work because they are Jerusalem-based, and he wanted to support Israel.
Boelter’s interest in religion’s impact on society is reflected in a “Revoformation” PowerPoint that Kalech said Boelter gave him, dated September 2017.
“I am very concerned that the leadership in the U.S. is slowly turning against Israel because we are losing our Judaic / Christian foundations that was [sic] once very strong,” the presentation said. “I believe that if the Christians are united and the people who are leading this Revoformation are a blessing to Israel that it will be good for both Israel and the U.S.”
Over the years, Boelter would reach out with what appeared to be exponentially ambitious endeavors, Kalech said: “What he wanted to take on, I think, might have been bigger.”
Boelter wanted to end American hunger, according to another project’s PowerPoint. And while the idea would require massive changes to current laws and food regulation, it appeared Boelter dismissed that as surmountable if only elected officials could get on board.
“American Hunger isn’t a food availability problem,” the presentation said. “American Hunger is a tool that has been used to manipulate and control a vast number of American’s [sic], with the highest percentage being people of color. This tool can and should be broken now, and failure to do so will be seen as intentional criminal negligence by future generations.”
“We should be embarrassed as a nation that we let this happen and have not correctly [sic] this injustice 100 years ago,” one slide said.
One slide described how his own lived experience informed his idea, referring to him in the third person: “several times in his life Vance Boelter was the first person on the scene of very bad head on car accidents,” and that he was able to help “without fear of doing something wrong” because he was “protected” by Good Samaritan law – which could and should be applied to food waste, the slide said.
To keep an eye on which lawmakers supported the necessary legislation, “there needs to be a tracking mechanism,” the presentation said, where citizens could “see listed every singe [sic] elected official and where they stand on the Law (Food Providers Good Samaritan Law).”
“Those few that come out and try to convince people that it is better to destroy food than to give it away free to people, will be quickly seen for who they are. Food Slavers that have profited off the hunger of people for years,” the 18-slide, nearly 2,000-word presentation said.
“At least in his mind and on paper, he was solving problems,” Kalech told ABC News. “He would think about things and then have a euphoric moment and write out a manifesto of, How am I going to solve this? And then bring those thoughts to paper and bring that paper to an action plan and try to implement it.”
The last project Kalech said Boelter wanted to engage him for was a multifaceted collection of corporations to help start-up and expanding businesses in the Democratic Republic of Congo, all under the umbrella “Red Lion Group.”
The 14-page, over 6,000-word planning document for the project outlined ideas for what Red Lion Group would offer: ranging widely from “security services” to agricultural and weapons manufacturing sectors, medical supplies, investment services, martial arts, oil and gas and waste management. Red Lion would also serve in media spaces: with “CONGOWOOD” Film Productions “to be what Hollywood is to American movies and what Bollywood is to Indian movies.”
Boelter was to have a 49% minority ownership of the group, with a business partner owning 51%.
“The Africa thing, the Red Lion thing, we didn’t really get into it, because it became pretty apparent pretty soon that he just didn’t have the funds to go ahead,” Kalech said – at least, as far as his web design services were concerned.
“He was interested in doing good,” Kalech said. “But moderation in all things, and when good becomes extreme, it actually becomes bad,” adding that hurting anyone crosses a “red line.”
“The question one keeps coming back to is – what makes the seesaw tip? Like, he’s good, he’s good, he’s good, he’s acting for the greater good, he has all these good ideas, he’s trying to engage community, serving on a government committee, he’s engaging churches and places of worship, and then something happens, and he goes ballistic,” Kalech said.
“Who would do that? Someone who’s absolutely desperate, just seeing that there’s no other choice. That’s the only thing I can imagine. But look, obviously someone like this is not operating on the same frequency as we are,” Kalech said. “They’re blinded by their faith, or their beliefs. And, you know, especially something like murder, it’s so ironic, because that’s one of the big 10.”
(BOULDER, Colo.) — The man suspected of carrying out an “act of terrorism” during a pro-Israel demonstration in Boulder, Colorado, leaving eight people in the hospital, has been charged with a federal hate crime, according to court documents.
The suspect, 45-year-old Mohamed Soliman, told investigators “he researched on YouTube how to make Molotov Cocktails, purchased the ingredients to do so, and constructed them,” the court documents said.
Soliman allegedly told police “he wanted to kill all Zionist people and wished they were all dead,” the document said. “SOLIMAN stated he would do it (conduct an attack) again.”
He allegedly used a “makeshift flamethrower” and threw an incendiary device into a crowd of pro-Israel demonstrators at a pedestrian mall on Sunday afternoon, according to the FBI. He allegedly yelled “Free Palestine” during the attack, the FBI said.
The demonstration was a Run for Their Lives walk, which aims to raise awareness about the remaining hostages held by Hamas in Gaza and calls for their immediate release.
Eight victims, ranging in age from 52 to 88, were hospitalized with burns, police said.
Six of the eight have since been released from hospitals, a security source briefed on the situation told ABC News on Monday. Two victims remain in critical condition but are expected to survive.
Soliman was taken into custody and is being held on $10,000,000 bond, according to the Boulder County Jail, which listed a range of felony charges against him, including use of an incendiary device. The posted list of felony charges also appeared to include first-degree murder, although it was not immediately clear whether the charge was attempted murder. According to police, there have been no fatalities.
Soliman is due in court Monday afternoon.
Soliman is in the United States illegally, according to the Department of Homeland Security. entered the U.S. in August 2022 on a B2 visa and he filed for asylum in September 2022, according to Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security.
His B2 visa — which is typically a tourism visa — expired in February 2023, McLaughlin said.
Soliman was granted a work permit after his B2 visa expired, a senior official told ABC News. That work permit expired on March 28, so he has been in the country illegally since then, the official said.
President Donald Trump responded to the attack for the first time on Monday, writing on Truth Social that the crimes will be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law.”
“This is yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland. My heart goes out to the victims of this terrible tragedy, and the Great People of Boulder, Colorado!” the president added.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
