Sheldon Jeremy Williams, a 37-year-old Black man from South Carolina, was fatally shot in a hallway of the Burnsville Inn & Suites on July 23, 2021. Police say the shooting occurred around 6:20 p.m.; officers found Williams unresponsive with a gunshot wound to the head and pronounced him dead at the scene. Investigators later determined he had been shot six times.

Standing near Williams’s body was 24-year-old Ricky Eloy Ramirez of Houston, Texas, with a handgun at his feet. Surveillance footage reportedly shows Ramirez firing multiple times as Williams had just stepped out of his hotel room; Williams was unarmed and there is no indication the two men knew one another. Ramirez had arrived in Minnesota two days earlier with his girlfriend and father; the girlfriend told police he had begun acting strangely the day before, expressing fears that people were chasing him and that the government was after him. Ramirez was charged with second-degree murder and, in April 2022, a Dakota County judge found him not guilty by reason of mental illness and ordered commitment to a mental health facility.

Did anyone in Burnsville or who stayed at that hotel around July 23, 2021, notice anything that could help explain what happened?