A 20-year-old man has pleaded guilty to setting fire to a nutrition supplement store in the Midway area of St. Paul during the civil unrest and rioting after the police killing of George Floyd last year.

Samuel E. Frey, of Brooklyn Park, admitted Tuesday to one count of conspiracy to commit arson in the fire on May 28, 2020, that charred the Great Health and Nutrition store in a strip mall on University Avenue.

U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms investigators obtained video surveillance footage from inside the store on the night of the arson as evidence against Frey and others.

The store remained closed for nearly two months.

Federal authorities say they were tipped off to Frey's role when a relative called Brooklyn Park police two days after the fire and implicated him in looting in the aftermath of Floyd's killing.

Questioned by police in his basement bedroom, Frey admitted to looting but otherwise "didn't want to talk to officers in depth about what exactly had occurred ... because he's been up for 24 hours rioting and looting, and he's tired now," the criminal complaint read.

U.S. District Court records, Star Tribune
Samuel E. Frey is in the foreground of this surveillance image from the store.

According to prosecutors:

Frey, 20, McKenzy Ann DeGidio Dunn, 20, of Rosemount, and a 17-year-old girl, not identified, walked through several businesses in the Midway area of St. Paul before entering Great Health and Nutrition.

Frey poured a bottle of hand sanitizer on toppled shelving and lit it on fire with a burning piece of paper.

Afterward, Frey told Dunn and the teenage girl "to be untruthful to law enforcement by falsely reporting that another person had supposedly started the fire," according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office announcing Tuesday's guilty plea.

Dunn pleaded guilty in October to one count of conspiracy to commit arson. She was sentenced in May to three years' probation and ordered to pay more than $31,000 in restitution.

Sentencing for Frey has yet to be scheduled.

Federal charges against one suspected co-conspirator, Bailey M. Baldus, 20, of Ramsey, were dropped in July 2020. Defense attorney Daniel Guerrero told the Star Tribune at the time that store video showed "she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was not familiar with the individuals" who committed the arson.

Paul Walsh • 612-673-4482