Small community reeling from shooting where 2 deputies were injured
WINSTED, Minn. -- We know more Tuesday about the shooting of two rural Minnesota deputies. It happened in the small town of Winsted -- about an hour west of the Twin Cities.
Around 2,000 people call Winsted home. Just about every one of them is reeling, including Tracy Felder, "People are kind of in shock, the community has been here for a hundred years, there's families that have literally been here that long. It's very tight knit – we are just trying to process."
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Tracy raised his family there -- a small town known for its huge music festival, Winstock. Now, they're known for something else and as Tracy explains, "This is not how we want to be known is this situation."
It's quiet now, but 24 hours earlier, there was chaos and confusion. Rose got a startling text message from the city to stay on lockdown, "I was thinking is there a chemical spill? Is something major going on, I had no idea."
She was a few houses away from a standoff. She runs a home daycare, so she loaded up her precious cargo into a SWAT van, "I said we are gonna go on a field trip, we are gonna see some officers and they might look scary but they are just here to help us."
Deputies were serving a warrant to her neighbor. WCCO learned it was for ten counts of child pornography -- images of a young girl. The sheriff says a man in the home shot two deputies. They found him dead in the home a few hours later.
The sheriff says the deputies are home, resting and he says "God or someone had their backs because it could have been so much worse."
Tracy, who is a leader at the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church said, "We just pray for all those involved that they can find healing, physical and the whole process cause this is just a very bad situation."
As for the suspect and how the shooting unfolded, the BCA will release those details tomorrow or Thursday.