Vance Boelter's Life Before the Minnesota Shootings - Periods of religious zealotry and an unsettled professional career

Vance Boelter’s Life Before the Minnesota Shootings - The New York Times

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One moment he was an affable college freshman, pursuing a family passion by trying out for the baseball team. The next, he was giving up the game and shedding his belongings — even his cherished baseball bat — as if to put away childish things.

Suddenly, he was telling dorm mates they were going to hell, denouncing a guest speaker on campus as “Satan’s worker” and announcing he was now “all in for Jesus.” It was a lifelong commitment he would just as suddenly violate 40 years later, prosecutors say, with an act of political assassination that would stun the nation and send his home state of Minnesota into communal mourning.

Throughout his life, Mr. Boelter’s Christian belief in the sanctity of life seemed unwavering. He told a church congregation in 2021 that all the world’s wealth was “not worth the value of the person on your left, or the person on your right, or the person you see going home today.”

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After graduating from Christ for the Nations in 1990, he returned to Minnesota and, according to Mr. Carlson, started a ministry in a town not far from Sleepy Eye. He drove around the state pulling a huge cross on wheels, occasionally stopping along the roadside to preach.

“He always kind of took things way far,” Mr. Carlson said.