Minneapolis Protest Shooting Suspect Has a Confederate Flag Facebook Cover Photo
Minneapolis police have named the three suspects in custody for an alleged shooting at a Black Lives Matter protest Monday night. They are Allen “Lance” Scarsella, 23, of Lakeville; Nathan Gustavsson, 21, of Hermantown; and Daniel Macey, 26, of Pine City.
Scarsella was arrested at his home yesterday afternoon. In an apparent video of the arrest recorded by a neighbor, someone can be heard saying “Allen Scarsella, come out of the house with your hands up” over a megaphone, before two people separately exit a house and appear to surrender to police. It is not clear which is Scarsella.
Gustavsson and Macey turned themselves in later Tuesday and were booked on probable cause for assault, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.
A Facebook page with information matching Scarsella’s displays the “Bonnie Blue Flag,” an unofficial emblem of the Confederate States of America, as its cover photo. “This isn’t the somalian flag, btw,” Scarsella commented on the photo last year. The page’s “Likes” include several gun enthusiast pages, and several photos appear to show Scarsella at a shooting range.
A Facebook page matching Gustavsson’s information shows a young man in a camouflage jacket holding a rifle.
Police also briefly took into custody and questioned a 32-year-old Hispanic man who was determined not to have been at the scene of Monday’s shooting. That man’s name has not been publicly released, but according to the Star Tribune, his Facebook profile shows a man who “bears striking resemblance” to “SaigaMarine,” a pseudonymous 4chan user who recorded himself driving to the scene of the protests armed with a handgun on Thursday night. A page on the website ModelMayhem that appears to belong to SaigaMarine lists his age as 32.
The Sun Thisweek, a suburban Twin Cities newspaper, is reporting that Scarsella is “BlackPowderRanger,” the second masked man seen in the SaigaMarine video, though it is unclear whether that information was released by the police. Heavy.com points out that the man in Scarsella’s Facebook photos has a mole above his eyebrow that appears to match BlackPowderRanger’s.
Yesterday, the radio station Twin Cities News Talk released a video that is purported to have been taken by one of the gunmen just before the shooting. Because the video has no audio track, it is difficult to ascertain its content, but it shows what looks like the beginning of a scuffle after a tense exchange between protesters and the videographer.
Scarsella, Gustavsson, and Macey remain in police custody.
