Incident with man suspected of University of Minnesota threats began a day earlier, warrants show

A man suspected of threatening to kill students at the University of Minnesota also threatened specific members of his local sheriff's office and judges, new search warrants show.

Joseph Rongstad, 41, was arrested the afternoon of Jan. 11 following an hours-long standoff with the Chippewa County Sheriff's Office and other agencies at his home at 319 Park Av. in the southwestern MInnesota town of Watson. As of Wednesday, he had yet to be formally charged.

Prior to the threats targeting students, Rongstad allegedly made a long string of unhinged Facebook posts on his landscaping business' page, beginning on Jan. 10, a day prior to his arrest. Some posts made fraudulent claims he had a "nuke bomb" in Fargo.

The posts came from his business' Facebook page, All Time Curbing & Landscape, which only Rongstad had access to, according to the Sheriff's Office warrants.

Chippewa deputies first responded to Rongstad's home around 3 p.m. on Jan. 10 to conduct a welfare check, a search warrant states.

The deputies were unable to contact him. A little after 11 p.m. the officers were called back after new posts surfaced that targeted children, and a notice to "apprehend and detain" was put out, according to a warrant.

Rongstad's mother told a deputy she believed her son was barricaded in a second-floor bedroom that she could not get into, the warrant said.

The posts a little after midnight included explicit threats to Chippewa County Sheriff Derek Olson, and Chippewa County judges Thomas Van Hon and Keith Helgeson.

Many of Rongstad's posts went on to target U students. Campus alerts were put in place but later dropped when it turned out his threats were fake and he was surrounded at his home.

After bringing in a SWAT team and a bomb squad from Minneapolis, Rongstad was arrested without incident around 4:15 p.m. on Jan. 11, Olson said in a post.

In 2016, Van Hon ordered Rongstad civilly committed for six months as mentally ill and chemically dependent.

On Friday, Olson noted that the landscaping business Rongstad runs was "very successful in the past when he was a healthier person." Rongstad served for a time as mayor of Watson after being elected to the post in 2012. The town has a population of fewer than 200 people.