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The 911 call came in at 4:36 p.m. on a Wednesday, and by the time it was over, a routine child custody handoff outside a downtown Minneapolis apartment tower had turned into one of the worst mass shootings the city has seen in years. Three people were dead, including the gunman. Six more were wounded — two building employees, two neighbors' worth of terror on a single floor, and two Minneapolis police officers who ran toward the gunfire instead of away from it. By the time it was over, the man responsible, 35-year-old Carlton Neal Johnson II, had gone from a parking lot argument to a ninth-floor gun battle with police, and nobody who'd dealt with him in the months before it happened can say they didn't see something coming.
In Brief
- Carlton Johnson shot the mother of his child in a parking lot, then walked back inside Shoreline Plaza and kept going — two building employees, then two neighbors on the ninth floor, then two police officers who chased him up nine flights of stairs.
- Prosecutors had reviewed him for a red-flag gun seizure ten weeks earlier and decided the evidence wasn't there.
- The 911 call came in at 4:36 p.m. on a Wednesday, and by the time it was over, a routine child custody handoff outside a downtown Minneapolis apartment tower had turned into one of the worst mass shootings the city has seen in years.
It started as a handoff, not an ambush
Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension superintendent Drew Evans laid out the sequence at a press conference two days later, and it reads less like a mass-shooting plan than a domestic violence call that escalated floor by floor. Johnson met the mother of his child outside Shoreline Plaza — the high-rise near Loring Park that used to be called Loring Towers — for what investigators describe as a standard custody exchange. During that exchange, Johnson shot her in the leg. The child, who was present, got away with bystanders and was not physically hurt. A police officer at the scene applied a tourniquet that Mayor Jacob Frey later said likely saved her life.
That alone would have been a serious, isolated act of domestic violence. It's what happened next that turned it into a mass-casualty event. Instead of fleeing, Johnson walked back into the building he lived in. On the first floor, he shot two employees of the complex — one of whom Evans described as suffering critical injuries. Then he took the elevator up to the ninth floor, where he had an apartment, and shot and killed two of his neighbors: Dale Henry Spry, 63, and Muse A. Afrah, 61, both longtime residents on his floor.
Officers who ran up nine flights into gunfire
Responding officers arrived within minutes of the first 911 call and followed the sound of gunfire up the stairwell rather than waiting for backup to stage — a decision Frey and interim police chief Bill Peterson both went out of their way to praise. Two officers, Joseph Michnowski and Yahye Ahmed, were wounded in an exchange of gunfire with Johnson on the ninth floor; a third officer was hurt separately when a squad car responding to the scene was involved in a crash. Investigators say Johnson was killed during that exchange, though the exact sequence — how many rounds, from whom, in what order — is still being finalized.
Adding to the chaos, officers initially reported a smoke-like haze filling the hallway as they pursued Johnson — at first an unexplained detail that fed early, unconfirmed reports of some kind of chemical agent. Frey later said the likely explanation was far more mundane: a fire extinguisher had discharged somewhere in the struggle. Both wounded officers are expected to make a full recovery; Ahmed was released from Hennepin County Medical Center within two days, and Michnowski followed shortly after.
He was known to police. He was already being evicted.
This is the part of the story that residents and city officials keep circling back to, because it wasn't a case of a stranger with no history slipping through the cracks. Court filings show Johnson was already in eviction proceedings at Shoreline Plaza over lease violations, including an alleged assault of another resident back in March. On June 11, according to the building's attorney, Johnson allegedly walked through the complex openly displaying a firearm and brought it into the management office to show staff. Two weeks later, on June 25, Minneapolis police responded to a separate call reporting that Johnson had displayed a gun to another person; officers confirmed he had a valid permit to carry and, finding he hadn't drawn the weapon from his waistband, didn't act further that day.
The Hennepin County Attorney's Office says it reviewed both the June incident and a possible extreme risk protection order — Minnesota's red-flag law, which lets courts temporarily strip someone's guns if they're found to pose a danger — and in both cases concluded there wasn't enough evidence to move forward. A civil trial on Johnson's eviction had already been scheduled. The hearing date was September 11. He never made it that far, and neither did two of his neighbors.
Interim Chief Peterson, asked directly whether prosecutors dropped the ball, didn't take the bait and didn't dodge it either.
"We heard that pop, pop, pop, pop"
For the people who actually live at Shoreline Plaza, Thursday morning wasn't a policy debate — it was trying to get back into their own homes after a night in a hotel across the street. Deng Tutlem, who lived next door to Johnson, was home when the shooting started. He told reporters he and his family had just been sitting together when the gunfire began, and that he'd known Johnson well enough to have once asked him, directly, not to bring his gun near their shared hallway. When he cracked his apartment door to see what was happening, he said an officer in the hallway yelled at him to shut it — and moments later, police were pounding on doors, evacuating the floor, offering no explanation beyond "get out now."
Peterson said the building had a rocky history years ago that brought police out regularly, but that it had largely stabilized in recent years under closer coordination between management and the department's 1st Precinct — which makes Wednesday's collapse back into violence land even harder. By Thursday afternoon, Frey said every resident except those on the ninth floor had been allowed back into the building. The ninth floor — where two men who'd lived there for years were killed in their own hallway — stayed sealed off as a crime scene.
A city that's been here before, too recently
Two days after the shooting, a group of Hennepin Healthcare doctors and gun violence prevention advocates stood outside Minneapolis City Hall and said, bluntly, that they are running out of ways to absorb this. Dr. Mitch Radin, who leads the hospital's critical incident support team, said gun violence and mass-casualty response have become something his staff is asked to confront with rising, not falling, frequency. Emergency physician Tim Kummer, who treated patients from the shooting, connected it directly to last year's shooting at Annunciation Catholic School — a wound that hadn't come close to healing before this one opened.
State Sen. Scott Dibble, a longtime backer of tighter gun laws, pointed specifically at the red-flag process that had already touched Johnson's case once and let it go. A DFL-backed bill expanding firearm restrictions passed the Minnesota Senate in May along party lines but died without a vote in the House, and Dibble said lawmakers will likely take another run at it — though he was careful not to promise the votes will be there this time either. Maggiy Emery of the advocacy group Protect Minnesota put the fatigue in blunter terms than any elected official was willing to use on the record.
