Two more killings in St. Paul Sunday pushed the city into its deadliest year in more than a decade, prompting Mayor Melvin Carter to schedule public meetings across the city to talk about public safety.
The two murders brought the city's grim tally to 26. Nine people were killed in September alone.
"We will never accept violence as the norm," Carter said in a statement Monday. "Building the safe city we deserve will require new, proactive approaches to public safety, which must be built together."
The mayor has proposed a 2020 budget that would create a police department with 630 sworn officers, according to a city spokesperson. The mayor has also indicated that he may ask the City Council for more public safety funding in the 2020 budget.
In the first case on Sunday morning, police found a man dead inside a unit at Como-Dale Estates in the 600 block of Front Avenue. The Ramsey County medical examiner identified him Monday as Steven Dennis Malone, 65, of St. Paul. The medical examiner has not said how he died.
Officers who responded to the scene entered the apartment after Malone didn't respond to officers' knocks on doors and windows. After going in, they found what police spokesman Steve Linders described as a "very disturbing scene."
A woman, 37, from St. Paul, was later arrested and booked into the Ramsey County Adult Detention Center on suspicion of second-degree murder. Police were not sure of the relationship between the victim and the suspect.
In an unrelated killing that occurred just before 11:30 p.m. Sunday, police were called to the area of Kent Street and Central Avenue on a report of shots fired. They came upon a car nearby at St. Anthony Avenue and N. Dale Street, just off Interstate 94, where an unconscious man was in the driver's seat with a gunshot wound. He was taken to Regions Hospital, where he died. His name has not been released. No one has been arrested.
