A Minneapolis man has been arrested and charged with felonies after allegedly pulling out a gun and threatening staff at a historic gay bar in the city.
Hennepin County prosecutors say Conell Walter Harris, 30, entered 19 Bar, the oldest continuously operating LGBTQ bar in Minneapolis, located in the city’s Loring Park neighborhood, on Monday.
He quickly attracted the attention of other customers, who claimed he was “acting strangely,” according to Minnesota Public Radio News.
When an employee asked Harris for his ID, Harris became visibly upset. When a different employee asked Harris to leave, he allegedly pulled out a gun, held it in his hand, and said, “I ain’t going nowhere,” reports Minneapolis ABC affiliate KAKE.
Harris allegedly “squared up” with the employee, prompting a patron to insert themselves between Harris and the bartender in an attempt to de-escalate the situation, according to court documents. But Harris threatened both the employee and the patron, telling them, “Watch what the f— you’re saying,” and “I’m going to f— you up.”
Harris then exited the bar, telling the bartender, “I’ll f—ing kill your dyke ass” as he left.
Witnesses say Harris later re-entered the bar and began playing pool before officers arrived on scene. Police say Harris resisted arrest and repeatedly reached into his sweatshirt pocket. Officers allegedly recovered a .45 caliber Glock on Harris’s person.
Harris faces felony charges of making violent threats and being a prohibited person in possession of a firearm.
The incident comes less than two weeks after a mass shooting at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which killed five and injured 20 others. The alleged shooter in that case, Anderson Lee Aldrich, who identifies as nonbinary, was stopped after two patrons tackled them, beat them with their own gun, and restrained them until police could arrive.
Last week, a man in Atlanta was arrested for allegedly making “terroristic threats” towards at least two LGBTQ nightclubs. The suspect in that cases, Chase Staub, allegedly posted videos to Instagram that appeared to imply he intended to shoot up one club. Staub entered the second club in person and allegedly made threats to patrons and employees before being asked to leave.
On May 30, Cobalt Sovereign, a student at Hopkins High School in Minnetonka, entered the boys' bathroom and used one of the stalls. But another student looked over the stall and began harassing her, calling her anti-LGBTQ slurs while hurling insults at her.
Sovereign left the restroom, only to be trailed down the hall by the student and two others.
She got up the coverage to confront them, but when she turned to verbally confront her harasser, he punched her in the mouth.
"He had no reason to have anything against me," the 17-year-old told Minneapolis NBC affiliate KARE. "I've never talked to him, never done anything negative to him. And I was insulted and then eventually hit in the jaw.
On June 22, at around 7 a.m., deputies from the Olmsted County Sheriff's Office responded to a report of a single-vehicle crash along Interstate 90 in Eyota, Minnesota.
When they arrived on the scene, they found the driver, 32-year-old Margot Lewis, seated on a lawn chair in the median of the interstate, with a small passenger sedan crashed into a bridge pillar.
A subsequent investigation determined that the car had been traveling 105 miles per hour at the time of the crash.
The deputies soon discovered a body, wrapped in blood-soaked sheets, in the car's backseat, reports CBS affiliate KIMT.
A once-popular pornographic film actor has been charged with sending and receiving hundreds of videos of child pornography through the Telegram app, according to federal prosecutors.
Justin Heath Smith, 43, better known by his alias "Austin Wolf," was arrested on Friday, June 28, and charged with one count of distribution and receipt of child pornography and one count of possession of child pornography.
According to a press release from the office of Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, between March 24 and March 28, 2024, Smith, using an anonymous Telegram account, exchanged hundreds of videos containing child pornography with another individual whose phone was later seized and searched by the FBI after federal agents obtained a search warrant for it.
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