How a youth transformed from devout evangelist to shooting suspect

VANCE Boelter grew up in a sports-loving Lutheran family in a small Minnesota town where nobody locked their doors — a background that gave little hint of the zealotry to come or the deadly violence of which he is now accused.

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At 17, he had a religious conversion. As he recalled decades later during a passionate sermon overseas, what happened next shook his life. Waving a Bible and thundering from the podium, he spoke about meeting the Holy Spirit and running off pamphlets about Jesus to give to everyone he knew.

“So often in the world today, everyone wants an excuse for not doing the right thing. We want to blame someone else,” he preached in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as seen in a video posted online.

“God doesn’t say, ‘Oh, your parents messed up, I know you came into this world all troubled.’ ... You have a choice, you have a decision.”

Friends and neighbours of the 57-year-old say they are struggling to understand what drove him to allegedly masquerade as a police officer and shoot two state legislators and their spouses in the predawn hours of Saturday leaving state Rep.

Melissa Hortman and her husband dead and the other couple seriously injured.