Minneapolis residents were left to clean up the blood from a murder scene before setting up a memorial to Monique Baugh, a 28-year-old mother who was killed on New Year’s Eve.
Community activist Kay G. Wilson posted a video to Facebook Thursday afternoon that showed blood spattered in the snow in the north Minneapolis alleyway where Baugh was murdered.
“Sadly and graphically, there is so much blood over here that I’m trying right now to shovel some of the blood away from here where this memorial is,” said Wilson. “I can’t leave this like this. I can’t believe they didn’t clean this up. Look what we’re looking at.”
Wilson covered the blood with snow before laying rose pedals on the ground.
Baugh was shot and killed in an alley off of Russell Avenue North in Minneapolis shortly after 6:30 p.m. Tuesday evening. She was transported to North Memorial Medical Center and pronounced dead. She was a mother of two children and worked as an agent for Kris Lindahl Real Estate. Her murder marked the 48th homicide in Minneapolis in 2019, according to the Minneapolis Police Department.
The department announced that it had arrested 41-year-old Cedric Lamont Berry in connection with the murder of Baugh in the early morning hours Friday. Berry has been booked into the Hennepin County Adult Detention Center on probable cause murder, but no criminal charges have been filed yet.
Activists with the Safe Street Coalition gathered at Minneapolis City Hall Friday afternoon for a press conference to discuss Baugh’s death.
“Our first message is to the governor of the state of Minnesota. We think in our community we are in a crisis,” said Al Flowers. “We need the support from the governor, from the county, and from our mayor.”
“This murder was particularly brutal, and I want to say to the officials: we want to know what happened,” Flowers added.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey spoke at the press conference and vowed to secure justice for Baugh.
“This was not just some random person. We don’t have just random people. We don’t have random deaths in the city of Minneapolis. This was somebody’s mother, this was a businesswoman, this was a community leader. And this kind of violence has no place in the city of Minneapolis,” said Frey. “It is absolutely unacceptable and I can assure you with 100 percent certainty that we’ve been working nonstop with our Chief Arradondo to make sure that the perpetrators of this kind of violence are in fact brought to justice.”
“We will not tolerate it here in our communities. And by the way, when I talk about our communities, I’m not just talking about the violence downtown,” Frey added. “I’m talking about the violence on the north side. I’m saying that the north side should not get the short end of the stick.”
– – –
Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Blood in Snow” by Steven Deplo. CC BY 2.0.
