EXCLUSIVE: Street racers pour gas, light fire to Minneapolis roadway
By Crime Watch MN, Mar. 25, 2022
Back on February 12, we posted about street racers, or “hotrodders” as they are usually referred to on police dispatch, blocking an intersection after 1 a.m. in south Minneapolis.
The police dispatch at the time subsequently stated that the hotrodders had lit a fire in the roadway.
Following the incident, we filed a data practices request with the City of Minneapolis to obtain the Milestone video from the incident. Milestone is a video management system the city uses to store and manage video data from its network of public safety cameras.
We received two videos of the incident, below, that show the intersection of East Franklin Avenue and Cedar Avenue South on Feb. 12 after 1 a.m.
The videos show apparent gasoline being poured from a gas can into a circular form and then being lit on fire. People can be seen jumping into the fire rings, as well as multiple vehicles spinning and doing burnouts around the fire rings.
(Continued below images)
(Still images from video)
We’ve been provided information from a confidential source that police are aware of and have identified at least two people who have reportedly been regularly involved in organizing the street blockages and burnout activity over the last several months across the Twin Cities. We don’t have information on whether one or both individuals were present at this particular incident.
Last year, two young people who were bystanders were shot and killed within the same hour at two separate hotrodder/street racing events in Minneapolis after gunfire broke out at the locations.
Vanessa Jensen, 20, was shot and killed before 2 a.m. on June 5 at North 2nd Street and 22nd Avenue North, and Nicholas Enger, 17, was shot and killed at East Lake Street and Hiawatha Avenue South within the same hour, according to police reports. To date, no suspects have been charged in either killing.
(Images/info from our exclusive 2021 Minneapolis homicide map)
We’ve reported on the hotrodder and street shutdown incidents that have become a regular occurrence over the last two years across the cities, sometimes with multiple incidents in a week, and often with multiple incidents in any given night.
We have repeatedly posted and reported about gunfire incidents where hotrodders have gathered over the last two years.
Minneapolis police have often aired on dispatch over the last two years that they don’t have the manpower or resources to converge upon or shut down many of the pop-up hotrodder or street racing incidents where hundreds of people and vehicles are often present, sometimes in multiple areas in the city at the same time.
We’ll continue to follow developments in the street racer/hotrodder incidents. Be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest and breaking information about incidents.
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