GOLDEN VALLEY, Minn. — A search warrant obtained by KARE 11 shows new details in an apparent murder-suicide in Duluth last week.
During a law enforcement search for more information, previous encounters with suspected shooter Anthony George Nephew came to light.
That search warrant says on July 3, 2024, officers responded to a home after Nephew's wife reported him as suicidal. The police report from that night shows that when officers arrived, Nephew was crying and visibly shaken.
The report says Nephew said he needed help, and that he had "attacked" somebody. He later admitted to holding a knife to someone's neck. Nephew told the officer that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and that voices had been telling him that Donald Trump is going to take over the world, and Nephew needed to kill his family to protect them.
Nephew was taken to a hospital, and repeated that if Trump took over, he and his family needed to be killed.
According to the search warrant, just two months later on September 9th, Nephew applied for a permit to purchase a firearm. He was granted that permit the same day.
The rapid nature of Nephew's permit approval is raising questions for violence prevention experts like Christopher Carita.
"That is the most troubling thing that I see in this case, is that the permitting process did not catch the incident from two months earlier," Carita, founder of Carita Consulting, said.
We asked Carita about Extreme Risk Protection Orders, which began earlier this year. Those ERPOs aim to temporarily prohibit someone from purchasing or possessing a firearm during a period of crisis when they are at risk of harming themselves or someone else.
Carita says it's tough to say if this would have helped in this situation, especially considering the circumstances of what happened in July.
"If the suspect wasn't making any threats regarding firearms, and he was cooperative, which is what it states in the warrant, and was willing to go get help, and there was no other nexus to firearms or threats around firearms, I could see see that seeking mental health care for the suspect and trying to get him the help he needs would have been the appropriate action," Carita said.
KARE 11 has reached out to both the Duluth Police Department and the St. Louis County Sheriff's office to clarify who issued the permit to Nephew. We have not heard back at the time of this article's publishing.