Warrants, court shed some light on shooting

Search warrants issued just after the deadly Jan. 8 shootings at the Super 8 hotel in Cloquet reveal how much investigators will be processing from a scene where three people were found dead, including the suspected shooter.

The first search warrant signed off by a Sixth District Court judge was standard, and came just seven hours after the shooting that Monday night. It allowed police to search and collect evidence after midnight from the hotel property and vehicles belonging to the suspected shooter and victim Patrick Roers, who was shot while sitting in his vehicle.

The first warrant application, and the subsequent inventory of what was found, show that Nicholas Lenius apparently first shot hotel clerk Shellby Trettel using a 9 mm handgun. Bullet casings and fragments were found in the office at the hotel and in Roer's Chevrolet Avalanche, into which Lenius is believed to have shot multiple times, killing Roer instantly.

In searching the area in that east part of the hotel parking lot, police found Lenius, dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot.

A Super 8 employee called 911 at 6:30 and reported that it looked as if Trettel had been attacked. She was alive when emergency crews arrived, but was later declared dead at a hospital in Duluth.

Casings and shell boxes were found in Lenius' Ford F-150 pickup. Shell cartridges and ammunition were also found in Lenius' room on the first floor of the two-story hotel along with a magazine for the handgun.

Both Lenius and Roers were guests at the hotel at the time of the shootings, an event that police suspect lasted about 10 minutes, ending at around 6:30 p.m. Jan. 8.

The original warrant application stated that Lenius' truck was facing toward Roer's vehicle. It also said that in Lenius' truck there was a "camera inside" and it "appeared that it was actively recording."

The timeline assessment came from the hotel surveillance system, which police also sought custody

of as part of the original search warrant. Police watched footage at the hotel to be sure that there was no longer a public threat as that area of Cloquet was on a shelter-in-place order.

Police were able to deduce from the camera footage that Lenius was the shooter.

He had also been seen on the phone during the shootings. In a second warrant applied for by the Cloquet Police Department on Jan. 16, it was revealed that Lenius was speaking with his work "supervisor," who told police that Lenius had messaged "WTF is going on" to the supervisor's phone. The supervisor told police that he called Lenius, which matched what police had seen from camera footage. The search warrant application did not provide any further details on the Lenius text or the consequent phone conversation.

Footage revealed Lenius going in and out of his pickup. A cell phone was found in the center console. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension now has the phone and will process information from it, as allowed in the second warrant.

Electronics used by the shooting victims are also being processed in order to determine if there were any connections between the victims and the shooter. A laptop and other computer items were also found in Lenius' room.

Memorial services for Trettel, 22, who was from Cloquet, and Roers, 35, on a work assignment here and from Deer River, took place last week.

Who is the shooter?

There has been little personal information available publicly on Lenius, 32, including any of the regular footprints often found on social media sites. There have been no publicly known funeral arrangements or services. His residence was listed as Ramsey by police, which is in the Twin Cities metro area. Media outlets there have reached out to family members, with no responses.

One of his addresses listed in court records is linked to the owners of a company called Express Freight Incorporated. A LinkedIn page online shows a Nicholas Lenius as a "residential delivery manager" who had been working for Express Freight since 2007, when he would have been 16 years old. The page also says he went to Bemidji State University and graduated with a business degree in May 2013. That was the same month when Lenius, court records show, was arrested for driving while intoxicated northwest of the Twin Cities area and stated to police that he had been driving home from Bemidji.

A Facebook post from Tammie Lenius, who lives at the address associated with Express Freight, according to state records, shows a photo she identifies as her son, Nicholas Lenius.

According to court filings, Lenius' most serious brushes with the law are two gross misdemeanor DUI arrests, which led to jail time, work release, and probation.

The first DUI arrest was early on a Wednesday evening on May 15, 2013 in Sherburne County near Big Lake, when Lenius was reported to authorities. A driver said the Chevrolet Suburban was weaving across the driving lane and even heading into oncoming traffic. Police found him parked in a ditch, according to court records, and he took a preliminary breath test that showed a .22 blood alcohol level, more than twice the legal limit to drive (.08) in Minnesota. Police said Lenius told them he was traveling home from Bemidji, where records show he was enrolled in college.

Lenius later argued with officers at the jail and refused a chemical test. He was convicted on the refusal and several probationary terms were placed on him.

A year and four months later, Lenius was again arrested for DUI, this time in Kanabec County. Before 9 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 28, 2014, a caller reported that an erratic driver of a white van was headed north on Minnesota Highway 65 about 10 miles south of Mora. The vehicle Lenius was driving was found parked on the side of a street in Mora and officers found him sleeping in the van, a report states, and he was mostly unintelligible when responding to questions. He had a preliminary breath test of .22 and an open bottle of rum in a backpack next to the driver's seat.

Lenius was cited for violations of probation placed in the first case, including avoiding alcohol and not having any similar incidents.

Lenius was also ordered to have both chemical and mental health assessments done. It isn't clear how standard those requests are in DUI cases. When serving a month-long jail sentence in May 2015 related to that case, a required urine sample showed methamphetamine in his system. Records are unclear on how that fact altered his probation. He was off probation for the DUI and the spider web of court orders by 2018.

There are no other court records on Lenius after that year.