Minneapolis carjacking suspect charged after victim dragged to death

Gerald Nicolas Cepeda now faces a second-degree murder charge after Minneapolis police say a carjacking turned into a fatal dragging on the city’s south side, leaving a man dead in Ventura Village after trying to stop the theft of his van.

According to the criminal complaint, the violence began near Chicago and Franklin avenues and ended at 18th Street and Chicago Avenue. Police said they were called after a report that a pedestrian had been dragged by a vehicle and was lying in the street. The victim later died from catastrophic injuries after officers tried life-saving measures at the scene.

Investigators say surveillance video showed Cepeda loitering near a bus stop before he ran toward the victim’s white van and jumped into the driver’s seat. The victim had arrived moments earlier and was seen talking with people on the sidewalk. When Cepeda allegedly drove off, the victim tried to stop the theft by hanging onto the open driver’s door.

The complaint says the van traveled for about two blocks with the victim clinging to it before Cepeda turned onto East 18th Street, where the victim fell and was run over. Officers later found the van a few blocks away with the keys still in the ignition and the victim’s dogs still inside, a detail that sharpened the brutality of the scene for neighbors and investigators alike.

The injuries were devastating. The victim died from multiple cardiac and aortic lacerations, a lacerated lung, multiple rib fractures, a femur fracture, a complete toe amputation, and blunt-force trauma to nearly every surface of his head and body. Those findings are at the center of the homicide case now moving through Hennepin County.

Cepeda allegedly told police he was “just playing a joke” and said he intended to bring the van back. Prosecutors, however, are treating the killing as homicide because the victim was fatally injured during the course of the carjacking, not in some separate encounter. Court records cited in local reporting say Cepeda also had prior vehicle-theft convictions in 2024 and 2025. He was arrested April 14.

The case lands in a city where carjacking has been closely tracked. Minneapolis maintains public crime dashboards and location maps, while the Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension keeps a statewide carjacking data system. Its 2024 Uniform Crime Report said violent crime in the seven-county Twin Cities metro area rose 1 percent, a reminder that this kind of daylight street violence is being watched closely across the region.