Minnesota lawmaker shootings — gunman used a list of 11 data broker sites to find home addresses (June 2025)

What happened

In the early-morning hours of June 14, 2025, a man dressed as a police officer drove first to Champlin, Minnesota and then to Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, in an SUV outfitted with police-style lights. At the first stop, he shot State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. Both survived. At the second stop, he killed State Representative Melissa Hortman, the former Speaker of the Minnesota House, and her husband Mark.

The shooter, Vance Luther Boelter, fled and was captured two days later in Green Isle, Minnesota. He was charged federally with two counts of murder with a firearm, two counts of stalking, and additional firearms charges, and at the state level with two counts of second-degree murder and additional charges.

How it started

Investigators searching Boelter's SUV recovered five firearms, ammunition, and several handwritten notebooks. The notebooks listed dozens of Minnesota state and federal elected officials by name, often paired with their home addresses. They also contained a written list of 11 registered data broker websites — the people-search sites that aggregate and resell home addresses, phone numbers, relatives, and adjacent records.

According to the FBI affidavit, Boelter used those broker sites to find the home addresses of Hortman and Hoffman. He had notations on which sites were free and which charged a fee, and how much information each required. The list was the lookup tool. The notebook was the result.

Boelter staked out the homes before the attack.

Why this case matters

Most public reporting on data broker harms relies on inferred chains: an address was somehow found, the most likely source was a broker page, the page is still up. The Hortman case is different. The FBI recovered the list. The chain is documented, not inferred. The 11 broker sites are named in court filings as the operational mechanism that produced the home address.

That makes this case the clearest publicly documented example of the data broker chain ending in a fatal home attack on a US elected official.

What this means for you

For any first responder, judge, prosecutor, federal agent, or elected official: the lookup mechanism Boelter used is publicly available, sells your address by default, and re-lists your address after removal unless someone keeps demanding it stay down. State broker-removal statutes — like New Jersey's Daniel's Law, which lets covered officers sue data brokers that fail to remove a home address — and the federal Lieu Act give covered persons grounds to demand removal. Running those demands across the 11 sites Boelter wrote down — and the dozens more like them — and running them again when the address comes back is what makes the law actually work.

For more on the broker chain and which sites matter most, see /data-brokers and /laws/daniels-law.

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