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

What happened

Before dawn on June 14, 2025, a man dressed as a police officer drove first to Champlin, Minnesota and then to Brooklyn Park, Minnesota in an SUV fitted with police-style lights. At the first home, he shot State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. Both survived. At the second home, 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 indicted on six federal counts and pleaded guilty to all of them on June 11, 2026: two counts of murder through use of a firearm, two counts of stalking, and two firearms violations. Federal prosecutors dropped the death penalty and recommended two consecutive life sentences plus 40 years. Sentencing is scheduled for July 23, 2026.

How it started

Investigators searching Boelter's SUV recovered firearms, ammunition, and several handwritten notebooks. The notebooks named dozens of Minnesota state and federal elected officials, often paired with their home addresses. They also held a written list of 11 data broker websites. These are people-search sites that collect and resell home addresses, phone numbers, relatives, and related records.

According to the FBI affidavit, Boelter used those broker sites to find the home addresses of Hortman and Hoffman. He noted which sites were free, which charged a fee, and how much information each required. Court filings described months of planning before the attack.

Why this case matters

Most reporting on data broker harm relies on an inferred chain: an address was found somehow, a broker page was the likely source, and the page is still online. This case is different. Investigators recovered the actual list, and the 11 broker sites are named in court filings as the tool that produced the home addresses.

That makes it a rare, publicly documented example of the data broker chain leading to a fatal home attack on a US elected official: the broker step is named in court filings rather than inferred.

What this means for you

If you are a police officer, judge, prosecutor, corrections officer, federal agent, or elected official, the same lookup path is open against you. These sites sell your home address by default, and they re-list it after removal unless someone keeps filing to take it down.

Whether the law gives you a removal right depends on who you are and where you work, and the coverage is narrower than most people assume. New Jersey's Daniel's Law lets covered New Jersey law enforcement, judges, and prosecutors require data brokers to take down their home address and unpublished phone number, but it reaches only New Jersey. The federal Daniel Anderl Judicial Security and Privacy Act gives federal judges and their families a similar demand right, and it does not extend to federal agents, prosecutors, or other officials. Neither law would have covered the victims here: Hortman and Hoffman were Minnesota state legislators, and Minnesota has no broad broker-removal statute. For that fact pattern, no removal law applied.

Where a removal law does apply, it does not clear a listing on its own. Someone has to file the request against each site and refile when the record returns. Where no such law applies, as in Minnesota, the broker opt-out process is the only lever, and it has to be worked site by site.

Frontline Privacy files those removals and opt-outs across the data broker sites and keeps checking for records that come back. To understand the broker chain and which sites matter most, see our data broker overview and Daniel's Law.