Incident: Wednesday, September 2, 2026, Loring Park, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Footage released by the Minneapolis Police Department: September 16, 2026.
Minneapolis Police Department officers were sent to an occupied high-rise apartment building in Loring Park on a report of an active shooter. Going in, they had residents down inside and a gunman still active in the building. Two patrol officers exited the stairwell to the ninth floor and began clearing an open hallway.
Carlton Neal Johnson II, 35, stepped into the hallway and opened fire on them. One officer was shot in the abdomen. A second officer was shot in the leg. A third officer was cut by flying glass. Johnson died in an exchange of gunfire with police inside the building.
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Before officers reached him, Johnson had killed two residents: Dale Henry Spry, 63, and Muse Abdi Afrah, 61. A child in the building was unharmed.
Both officers who were shot lived. The officer hit in the abdomen went into surgery and was released from the hospital on September 16, about two weeks after the shooting. The officer hit in the leg was released the next day.
Johnson is dead, so there is no case against him. Nobody else has been charged. The shooting has not been ruled on. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension holds the investigation and it is open. The charging decision belongs to the Hennepin County Attorney, who has announced nothing.
Legally, there is zero question on this one. Active shooter, people down, gunman still in the building. It is justified on every level, and that is not what this breakdown is about. This one is about tactics.
These are patrol cops, not a SWAT team. You can hear them huffing and puffing because they are not taking the elevator to an active shooter. They come out of the stairwell on the ninth floor into a long open hallway in a big apartment complex, and they split it the right way. One officer takes the doorway on the right. The other covers long down the hallway. That is how you clear it.
The suspect steps into the frame, and the officer committed to the doorway is the first one hit. Watch that officer after he takes the round to the stomach. He runs down the hallway and gets somewhere safe. Later you can literally see him checking himself for blood. Shot in the stomach and still in the fight. There is nothing wrong with retreating once you have been hit, and he is still covering while he does it.
The second exchange comes a moment later. That is where the other officer takes the round to the leg, and the fire extinguisher dust you see in the hallway is a round hitting the extinguisher.
If I have a note, it is that I would have liked to see more officers come out of that stairwell into that hallway. It looks like two of them made the trip. But in an active shooter you have to close distance and take ground. There is nothing else you can do. They went toward the gunfire, they got caught in the open when he came out, and they put him down. That encounter was about as good as you are going to get. I am glad they all made it through.
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