Letter from Minneapolis.

Dear Colin,

My wife and I were Twins fans and after the new stadium was built, we really wanted to see Target Field and take in a ballgame.

I grew up in the Richfield and Bloomington area, so as a kid I had the opportunity to see lots of Twins games starting with my father taking me to see them at the old Met Stadium and then later on at the Dome. Kris grew up in Bemidji, Minnesota, and never had an opportunity to go to any games, be it hockey, baseball or footxball, she just never had been to see one before and after they built Target field I promised her I would take her down to see it and watch a game.

It was a bit of a trip for us because we lived in Roseau (I still do) Minnesota and that’s up by the Canada border. We decided to make a long weekend event of it and stay in a hotel room in Bloomington and take the light rail system down to Target Field.

This would have been in July sometime. I don’t recall the date, but I know it was after the Independence day holiday. If memory serves me correctly, the Sox were in town and the Twins won that night, but it may have been another team because obviously, that wasn’t what wound up making the night memorable.

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I work at Polaris Industries in Roseau and I had been just about ready to return to work after a pretty awful leg injury had me on Workers Compensation for about three months, so I was walking, but very gingerly at that time. Kris also had worked at Polaris, but had been diagnosed with MS in 2005, so she had to go onto Social Security Disability shortly thereafter.

The leg injury was bad enough, but I had no idea yet, and neither did my wife, that things were about to get a whole lot worse. She didn’t have any symptoms yet, but by the end of September (right around the time we were all healed up from the attack) she started showing symptoms of what would be diagnosed as lung cancer by very early November. So in between my leg injury and her getting terminal cancer, we got the snot beat out of us just because we wanted to go watch a ballgame.

We had parked at a parking ramp in Bloomington where the train stops to pick up people, and we jumped on after we figured out how it all worked, and rode downtown to see the game. The ride to the game was uneventful. On the way back, it wasn’t very crowded on the train once we got up to the Richfield area, but my wife and I weren’t the least bit concerned for our safety. We probably should have been.

Having not grown up in the Twin Cities area, my wife was probably a bit naïve concerning certain etiquette (for lack of a better word) when you are out and about in a large metropolitan area. She was also not one to keep her mouth shut when she perceived any kind of injustice being visited on someone.

There just happened to be four African-Americans on the train very near to us as well as an elderly Caucasian gentleman. The two black men were enormous. That much I remember. I mean, we’re talking 6′ 4″ or 6’5″ here. Probably both were close to 300 pounds. There were two black women with them, but they weren’t sitting with the guys, they were sort of standing together and berating the old guy about not liking to be too close to blacks or something like that. Personally, I think they were just crowding him to try to get a reaction out of him.

The black ladies were just in his face hollering at him, and he was kind of cowering down in his seat looking scared.

This wonderful, beautiful woman that I had the good fortune to be married to for fifteen years (God rest her soul) didn’t like what was happening and before I could politely and gently gag her, she says to the black ladies, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size”?

Big. Mistake. These two bitches whirl around and the name calling started. My wife tried to remain calm and of course, tried to reason with them, but they weren’t having it. The names she was called were Ho, Bitch, Slut and a couple of others that I can’t recall, but I do recall that every name was preceded by “cracker.”

At this point, the big dudes seemed uninterested in what was happening. You know. Kind of like this type of thing happens all the time? Then the fists started flying. The two of them against my poor, disabled wife. I wasn’t going to let her get hit, so I stepped in front of Kris and yelled for them to stop. I told them she is disabled and to please leave her alone. I didn’t say it very kindly, I guess, so now the big dudes are glaring at me.

We were coming up to our stop and I said that we are leaving and can’t you please forget it? Nope. At first I thought they were just going to let us go when we got off. We made it into the garage and we saw they were all coming after us, but my wife couldn’t run. Of course there was nobody in sight to render assistance either. I won’t bore you with a lot of details, but my wife was spared a horrible beating by the fact that she was able to partially roll underneath a pickup truck.

She had both of her eyes blacked and her lips were both split. She had been kicked a few times by the girls. Don’t ask me how she didn’t have any broken ribs or internal injuries, but she escaped serious injury other than a concussion.

I had broken ribs, a concussion, broken nose, a nasty scratch on my neck. I reinjured my leg in the chaos. It seemed like forever we were getting kicked and punched, but it was probably closer to about a couple of minutes. They would have killed us, I think, but they suddenly stopped when some people finally came around the corner.

I remember a couple of ladies helping us to our vehicle. I wish I had thought to get their names. They probably saved our lives by coming when they did with some others. My wife was focused on only one thing that night, and that was getting the Hell out of the city and going home. I tried to get her to go to the cops with me, but she wanted no part of it.

I couldn’t say that I blamed her. I just wanted to go home where I knew we were safe and sound up in the peaceful North! We both thought we were going to die that night. I have carried a gun ever since. That WILL NOT ever happen to me again.