The death of the founder of a one-person website that monitored and shared police scanner traffic in the Twin Cities and elsewhere in Minnesota has inspired a friend to revive the popular online service.
The mother of Jeff Sandell, creator of mnpoliceclips.com, said that someone has stepped up and hopes to have the website and its accompanying Facebook and Twitter accounts operating again in the next several weeks.
Until his death on July 5 at age 39 from colon cancer, Sandell had stayed largely anonymous for the past five-plus years while tracking from his home in the Buffalo area the movements of law enforcement during conversations with dispatchers.
Whether it was police chases, deadly traffic crashes or homicides, mnpoliceclips.com captured scanner audio whenever possible and posted it online, sometimes within minutes of unfolding events.
Sandell's efforts earned him fans by the thousands on social media and also made his site a valuable tool for newsroom staff members as they decided what news merited coverage.
His death brought all media platforms run by the website to a halt, sparking hundreds of messages of condolence for his passing and laments that mnpoliceclips.com had gone dark.
A man who became a friend of Sandell's through mnpoliceclips.com "said he will take it over and run it, hopefully the same as Jeff would have," said Jeff's mother, Nancy Sandell. "I don't know how long it will take for him to get it going. We are meeting today."
In the meantime, he's learning the ropes and upgrading scanner and recording equipment, she said.
"He told me, 'I hope I can do it justice,' " said Sandell, who added that her son's successor isn't ready yet to disclose his identity.
While there is a modest amount of advertising that appears on the site, Sandell said mnpoliceclips.com never was much of a moneymaker for her son, who shared a home with his 83-year-old grandmother and "worked setting up websites."
"Jeff worked 20 hours a day for everyone here," Sandell said in a posting Tuesday on the website's Facebook page, "and it is going to be [an] adjustment for the person taking over this site. So please bear with the site during the transition."
News that the scanner tracking will crank up again was quickly embraced on the website's Facebook page.
"He did an amazing job at keeping us all informed," read one of many postings. "I feel lost without this site. I'm so happy that someone is going to keep it going. What a wonderful way to keep all of his hard work alive!"
Paul Walsh • 612-673-4482
