Authorities ID artist killed in shooting in St. Paul’s Lowertown
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Authorities on Friday identified the woman killed in an apparently random shooting while working on an outdoor art project in St. Paul’s Lowertown neighborhood on Wednesday evening.
66-year-old Carrie Shobe Kwok was shot outside the Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative where she lived.
“We’re a community in mourning, to have lost a member of our community who was in the act of beautifying our community,” St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said of Kwok at a news conference on Thursday. “All she was trying to do is give us an even more beautiful and enjoyable and peaceful community.”
Authorities also identified the suspected shooter. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner said Friday that Seantrell Tyreese Murdock, 29, of Belle Plaine, died of multiple gunshot wounds. St. Paul police fatally shot Murdock outside a home in Belle Plaine early Thursday after he allegedly emerged with a gun as they tried to arrest him.
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The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is handling the investigation of that shooting, and on Friday they identified the St. Paul officers who discharged their firearms. Officer Aaron Bohlen and Officer Lance Christianson are both on standard critical incident leave after the incident, the BCA said.
Authorities said it appears there was no prior connection between Kwok and Murdock. St. Paul Police Chief Axel Henry said the shooting was caught on surveillance video, and he called it “one of the most cold-blooded things I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Kwok had moved into the Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative in February.
“In the eight months of her residency, she endeared herself to all of us with her vivacious personality and sparkly demeanor,” said Ben Krywosz, the president of the cooperative.
“She combined a relentless optimism with a real-world pragmatism. She embodied the co-op’s self-managed pro activity with a smile, always with an open door, invitations to break bread together and enthusiasm for communal activities. And it was during one such communal activity, a group art project, when she took the world into her arms,” Krywosz said.
Kwok was a mixed media artist, working across many forms, from clothing and jewelry, to painting and woodworking.
“She was a very eclectic artist, and that really paralleled her personality,” said Tara Tieso, who lives in the coop and is the chair of the building’s membership committee.
Tieso said she spoke with friends of Kwok’s this week, “who said she was busy in every area of her life, and felt like she was really just sort of discovering so many new things at the same time, and was really just full of joy at this point in her life.”
“I think the importance of having artists in the city, in your neighborhood, really gives you a different sense of the beauty and the fragility of life, of the creative spirit,” Tieso said Friday afternoon.
Kwok had jumped in fully to the idea of a mural that the cooperative wanted to finish before the St. Paul Art Crawl, which starts Friday, Oct. 4.
“She was instrumental in making that happen for all of us,” Tieso said, with Kwok tracking down paint for the project at a paint recycling center.
“She was painting when this unimaginable moment occurred, and so she was in the middle of participation in something that was our first public art project together as a co op,” Tieso said.
“She sparkled,” Tieso said. “She’s how your time she talked to you. It’s just you saw, like, little sparkly things around her. She was truly that kind of person. And we’re just so lucky that you know she was part of our family of artists and and that she, she gave us that energy and and that spark she she motivated us. She was part of motivating us to do things we hadn’t done before.”
This year’s St. Paul Art Crawl will be dedicated to the memory of Carrie Kwok.