‘It should be called Trauma Street’: Lake Street neighbors warned of crisis before shootings

Nineteen-year-old Brianna Moore was getting food from the McDonald’s at E. Lake Street and Stevens Avenue in Minneapolis when gunfire rang out across the street. A shooter had fired into a crowd of homeless people gathered by the Interstate 35W bridge Monday, injuring five and leaving a gory scene.

The blood is what sticks with her, Moore said.

All summer she had been living with her boyfriend at a homeless encampment that developer Hamoudi Sabri had set up in a parking lot he owned at 2716 E. Lake St. At about 10 p.m. on Monday, another mass shooting lit up that encampment, injuring seven. Moore saw people shot in the head, a friend’s “floppy body” loaded onto a stretcher and police closing the scene, preventing people from gathering their belongings.

“I think it’s [messed] up how they started destroying everybody’s stuff, throwing everybody’s stuff away ... And there, it’s cleared now,” Moore said as she smoked a cigarette on a picnic bench at El Nuevo Campo Park, a block away, the following afternoon.

She laughed when asked if there was any help for the people who witnessed the shooting. “Hell no. They don’t care about us.”

The two mass shootings targeting people in the street, one of which was at an encampment, punctuated a summer of gun violence not just along Lake Street, but in pockets across south Minneapolis.

The number of encampments fell earlier this year as city leaders cracked down on illegal camping. But people from the nearby neighborhoods could plainly see that didn’t erase the miseries — addiction, sex trafficking and violence — playing out beneath bridges and around transit stations and other marginal patches of ground that often fall between government jurisdictions.

Residents near Lake and Stevens sent the Star Tribune photos of trash-lined streets and people passed out on porch steps months before Monday’s first mass shooting happened at that very intersection. They forwarded their pleas to the Minnesota Department of Transportation, which owns the land where open-air drug markets took place, to do something.

MnDOT officials did not respond to a request for comment this week.

“This didn’t just come out of nowhere,” said an audibly livid Soren Jensen, executive director of the Midtown Greenway Coalition, in a phone interview. “We’ve been asking MnDOT for months to do something, and of course, now the response is, ‘Oh, let’s fence it off.’ So basically you’re blocking people from using the transit center, you’re blocking people from accessing the Greenway. Fencing things off is not the answer.”

Minneapolis Police Lt. Ryan Kelly told residents in June that officers were assigned specifically to the area of Lake and Stevens to monitor the situation.

“One of the issues we run into here is that is state property and also Minneapolis Park Board,” he wrote in an email. “With that said we are actively working on removing those that are committing crimes in that area as well as facilitating with state.”

Extra State Patrol troopers will be patrolling south Minneapolis’ crime hotspots, the Minnesota Department of Public Safety said. Additionally, Community Safety Ambassadors and the Third Precinct’s Southside REACT Team — focused on catching perpetrators of drug and gun violence — will be in the area, according to the mayor’s office.

But the City Council members who represent the swaths of Minneapolis carrying the brunt of unsheltered homelessness — people staying outside and not in shelters — say they’ve been asking for action for months.

“Mayor Frey’s statement [Monday] commits to contacting MnDOT and securing the Lake Street area. But our question is: why has it taken so long?” asked Council Member Jamal Osman in an email following the first mass shooting. Osman, who voted in favor of city legal efforts to close Sabri’s Lake Street encampment before the shootings, called on the administration to do more than sweep those viewed as undesirable from one place to another.

Council Member Jason Chavez, who voted against the city’s push to close the camp, told the Star Tribune after the second mass shooting that Minneapolis fundamentally does not have a plan to address unsheltered homelessness.

Chavez has suggested building low-density, highly managed tiny home villages like those that have found success elsewhere in the metro. He believes Minneapolis needs to explore car-living programs like Duluth’s Safe Bay and regulated campsites.

By noon, there were no shelter beds for men, and only one bed for women left in Hennepin County, according to the Adult Shelter Connect intake hotline.

On any given night in Hennepin County, there are at least 400 individuals who are unsheltered, but over the past month there have been many nights with zero shelter beds available, said John Tribbett, service area director of Avivo, which runs Minneapolis’ indoor tiny home shelter.

“In our community we have a problem with gun violence,” he said. “Sometimes that takes place among people who have homes ... And sometimes that takes place in places where people are unhoused. And those people who are sleeping in a tent or who are stuck outside have no protection from a bullet.”

As city workers finished clearing the Sabri encampment, American Indian drummers briefly shut down the intersection of Lake and 28th, snarling rush-hour traffic in an attempt to draw attention to the shootings. Drummer Brandon Henry told the Star Tribune it was because Native people were hurt in the violence.

Watching from the sidewalk was Andre Gardiner, a retired social worker who had just come out of a community safety meeting at nearby Holy Trinity Lutheran Church. He wondered if the presence of the drummers meant any of the 12 shooting victims had died of their injuries.