Fleet Farm CEO raises questions about ghost buyer of gun used in St. Paul mass shooting

A Fleet Farm store manager said he asked whether the retailer should halt handgun sales to a man whose 2021 shopping spree included a gun fired in a St. Paul mass shooting months later, according to new documents filed 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 ghost buyers at its Minnesota stores. As discovery in the litigation was wrapping up this month, Ellison’s office reported a new revelation that a Blaine store manager at the time had questioned the sale of handguns to Jerome Horton.

Horton purchased 24 firearms from various Fleet Farm stores over a four-month period in 2021. A Mossberg MC2c 9mm pistol Horton purchased on July 31, 2021, in Blaine eventually ended up in the hands of Devondre Trevon Phillips, who had a prior felony conviction that made him ineligible to own a firearm. Phillips used the gun in a shooting inside the Seventh Street Truck Park Bar in St. Paul in October 2021. One woman was killed and 14 others were shot and wounded that night.

Just before the Aug. 2 deadline for discovery in the Minnesota lawsuit against Fleet Farm, the company turned over an incident report from the Blaine store with a store manager’s account 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 ghost buyer at least on July 31, 2021 — midway through Horton’s ghost buying spree — and failed to take steps to prevent future purchases by Horton,” Assistant Attorney General Katherine Moerke wrote 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 crimes related to purchasing dozens of firearms from Fleet Farm stores that they quickly transferred to people prohibited from owning firearms.

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

Although the report is redacted, Davis described it as a summary of documents the director reviewed in connection with the sale, and he believes he “scanned” information to Fleet Farm’s firearms specialist to ask for his opinion on whether any future sales to Horton should be stopped. The director recalled that he never received a response from the specialist. Davis wrote that the director also wrote that the employee who sold the firearms to Horton had “no reason to believe that this might be a fictitious purchase.”