Report: Fleet Farm manager raised questions about straw buyer of gun used in St. Paul mass shooting

A Fleet Farm store manager reported asking whether the retailer should cut off handgun sales to a man whose 2021 straw-buying spree included a gun fired in a St. Paul mass shooting months later, according to new filings in the state's lawsuit against the company.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison sued Fleet Farm in 2022, accusing it of negligence for not doing enough to stop straw buyers at its Minnesota stores. As discovery in the litigation neared an end this month, Ellison's office flagged a new disclosure that a Blaine store manager at the time questioned the sale of handguns to Jerome Horton.

Horton purchased 24 firearms from various Fleet Farm stores during a four-month period in 2021. A Mossberg MC2c 9mm pistol Horton bought on July 31, 2021, in Blaine eventually reached the hands of Devondre Trevon Phillips, who had a prior felony conviction that made him ineligible to possess a firearm. Phillips used the gun in a shootout inside the Seventh Street Truck Park bar in St. Paul in October 2021. One woman was killed and 14 others were injured by gunfire that night.

Just before an Aug. 2 deadline for discovery in Minnesota's lawsuit against Fleet Farm, the company turned over a Blaine store incident report with an account from a store manager related to Horton's July 31, 2021, transaction.

"The Detailed Incident Report demonstrates that Fleet Farm knew or should have known that Horton was a straw buyer by at least July 31, 2021 — halfway through Horton's straw buying spree — and failed to take action to prevent future purchases by Horton," wrote Assistant Attorney General Katherine Moerke, in a recent motion asking a judge to order more discovery from Fleet Farm.

Horton and Sarah Elwood are named in the lawsuit as two people since convicted of federal felonies related to buying dozens of firearms at Fleet Farm stores that they quickly transferred to people prohibited from possessing guns.

Andrew Davis, an attorney representing Fleet Farm, wrote in a memo this week arguing against Minnesota's request to expand discovery that the incident report was written by a former Blaine store operations manager in late February 2022 regarding his recollection of a July 31 transaction with Horton.

Though the report is redacted, Davis described it as a summary of documents the manager reviewed as part of the sale and his belief that he "e-scanned" information to Fleet Farm's firearms specialist seeking input on whether any future sales to Horton should be stopped. The manager recalled that he never got a response back from the specialist. Davis wrote that the manager also wrote that the employee who sold the firearms to Horton did not have "any reason to believe that this could be a straw purchase."

Davis said Fleet Farm has provided more than 16,000 documents including Fleet Farm acquisition and disposition logs reflecting handgun transactions for people who acquired four or more handguns from its Minnesota stores during any 14-day window between October 2016 and October 2023.

Davis said the documents provide no evidence of any straw purchasers other than Horton and Elwood, who both pleaded guilty to federal felonies and admitted to intentionally deceiving Fleet Farm when they purchased their respective guns.

Both parties are scheduled to return to federal court in St. Paul for a hearing on Minnesota's motions to broaden discovery in the case.

Moerke said Minnesota discovered that Fleet Farm had not produced all documents about Horton, based on new documents provided by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – which investigated the criminal cases against Horton and Elwood. She also wrote that Fleet Farm failed to identify the manager as a relevant witness and did not search for or produce documents from that manager during the lawsuit's discovery period. Fleet Farm's attorneys said that the alleged discrepancies were due to the company either no longer possessing certain documents because of the passage of time or attributable to technological issues that resulted in some documents not being turned over at the time.

Davis said Ellison's office is using a minor technical error in document production — that he said was immediately corrected and confirmed to be isolated — as a "crowbar to re-open discovery."

"Against this backdrop, the State's motion can be seen for what it is: an attempt to take a single document produced seven weeks before the close of fact discovery and use it as the basis for redoing discovery into Horton's and Elwood's transactions, because the State's discovery efforts to date have failed to uncover evidence consistent with the allegations in the complaint," Davis argued.

Minnesota wants a federal magistrate judge to order Fleet Farm to turn over additional information that would include all documents from that manager's "email, electronic files, and physical files" related to Horton and all store incident reports related to Horton. The state is also looking for information about how Fleet Farm searched for and collected documents during the discovery process and information "sufficient to show when Fleet Farm became aware of possible litigation related to the October 2021 mass shooting at the Truck Park Bar."