Standoff ends with suspect shooting self

Police are still investigating an armed standoff Saturday that ended with the suspect shooting himself and dying at the scene.

According to a press release from the Cloquet Police Department, officers from Cloquet, Fond du Lac, Carlton County and the Minnesota State Patrol responded to a home on the 300 block of Ridge Road at 10:19 a.m. Saturday, July 10, on a report of a man armed with a gun who entered the house and threatened the residents. The home is on the Fond du Lac Reservation within Cloquet city limits.

The responding officers were able to get others out of the house safely.

Over the following three hours, officers negotiated with the suspect, later identified as 20-year-old Avery Brenden Cogswell of St. Paul, to get him to surrender.

Cloquet police chief Derek Randall said negotiations were unsuccessful, and Fond du Lac officers entered the home and tried to use stun guns to subdue Cogswell.

“The tasers didn’t incapacitate him as planned and he ended up going out the front door and pulling a gun and shooting himself,” Randall said Wednesday.

Randall said his department is leading the investigation into the incident, and it’s too soon to know what other factors may have played into Cogswell’s actions. “We are trying to answer as many unknowns as possible, trying to figure out what caused the individual to enter the house in the first place and what might have caused him to take his life,” he said. Officers are waiting on the full autopsy report to determine if there were any substances in his bloodstream. The medical examiner’s preliminary cause of death is suicide. They are also still processing a cell phone found at the scene.

It was not a random incident. Randall said the people in the home were related to Cogswell’s girlfriend, so they were known to each other.

None of the officers on the scene were injured, nor did they discharge firearms. Randall said the department is following protocol — connecting officers with healthcare personnel and debriefing with professionals — to make sure the officers are also recovering mentally from the event.

“These are traumatic events,” Randall said, “We will continue communication with our officers to make sure they process these events in a healthy manner.

Although standoffs happen infrequently here, they do happen, Randall said.

Collaboration is vital, he said.

“In our area it’s almost a necessity. No agency up here has all the personnel or resources or the tools that are usually necessary for these events. We rely on each other for those items, to try to bring these events to a safe conclusion. But we don’t always have the control we’d like and in this case, the suspect took matters into his own hands.”

He expressed sympathy to Cogswell’s friends and family. “It’s obviously an unfortunate situation for everyone,” Randall said. “We will do all we can do to try to bring closure and answer the question of why.”

Once the investigation is complete, Randall said they would conduct a procedural review to make sure they are conducting responses in as safe a manner as possible.

“We will try to learn from this, to make sure none of our officers, community members or public are injured in any future scenario,” he said.

A review of Cogswell’s criminal record revealed mostly traffic convictions and no convictions above the level of a petty misdemeanor.