How accused Minnesota assassin Vance Boelter transitioned from popular local athlete to radical far-right Christian

MINNESOTA — Accused assassin Vance Boelter was a popular high-school athlete before becoming born again in his teens, moving into a tent in the park to preach and eventually morphing into an apparent far-right Christian.Boelter — a 57-year-old married dad of five accused of murdering Minnesota Democratic state Rep.Melissa Hortman and her husband and trying to assassinate Dem state Sen.

Mark Hoffman and his wife early Saturday — gave few hints in his childhood of the seeming religious radicalization he would undergo.The suspect was born into a sports-mad Lutheran family and raised in the small town of Sleepy Eye, with his father Donald a high-school baseball coach later selected for the Minnesota State High School Baseball Coaches Association Hall of Fame.In high school, Boelter was named “Most Friendly” and “Most Courteous,” according to pictures of his high-school yearbook shared by one of his classmates.One of five siblings, he seemed to have shared his family’s love for sports and was listed as captain of the basketball team and a member of the baseball and football teams, as well the chorus, in the yearbook.“Vance was a normal kid who came from a middle-class background,” former classmate Wendel Lamason told the Washington Post.Boelter was raised in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, with his father active in the church council and he himself participating in its youth groups.“He wasn’t rebellious.He was polite and all that.

He was just a good kid,” said Ron Freimark, who pastored a different Lutheran congregation in the town, to the outlet.Then at 17, Boelter had a religious conversion and declared himself born again, according to people in his life.While at high school, he began preaching in his local park and even lived there in a tent, according to lifelong friend David Carlson.“Everything in his life — he just changed.People were saying, ‘Yeah, Vance is in the park preaching.’ He was just trying to spread the w...