Teen suspect surrenders after Bemidji shooting leaves three critically injured

A shooting near 2500 Itasca Loop NW sent three adults to the hospital with critical injuries and triggered a precautionary lockdown at Sanford Bemidji Medical Center, putting a busy corner of Bemidji under an immediate public-safety response.

Police were called around 4:40 p.m. on May 7 to the apartment area south of Home Depot and west of the Bemidji Youth League Baseball fields. When Beltrami County deputies and Bemidji police arrived, they found three adults who had been shot. Emergency responders gave first aid at the scene before the victims were taken to Sanford Bemidji Medical Center, where hospital officials placed the facility into lockdown while officers searched for the suspect.

Investigators identified the suspect as a 16-year-old male who fled southbound toward 15th Street with a handgun. About two hours later, at roughly 6:40 p.m., he surrendered at the Beltrami County Law Enforcement Center without incident. Bemidji Police Chief Mike Mastin issued a release on the shooting, and police said they were still piecing together the circumstances that led to the gunfire.

The location sharpened the public impact. The shooting unfolded in a residential and apartment corridor that sits beside the Bemidji Youth League Baseball complex, which includes four full-sized little league fields and two full-sized baseball fields. It also came close to one of the city’s most visible commercial stretches near Home Depot, where a fast-moving police response would have been hard to miss for nearby tenants, customers, and drivers.

The lockdown at Sanford Bemidji Medical Center underscored how far the disruption reached. The hospital says it is the region’s largest and that its emergency department is a level III trauma center that treats nearly 30,000 patients a year, making any security response there a major event for patients, staff, and families. Bemidji has 14,574 residents, and Beltrami County says its sheriff’s office patrols more than 3,000 square miles and serves over 47,000 county residents, a scale that helps explain the size of the response once the shots were reported.

Follow-up on the shooting is expected to move through the Beltrami County Records Office, which maintains initial investigative and criminal files for the sheriff’s office and Bemidji Police Department. For neighbors near Itasca Loop NW, the evening ended with three people critically hurt, a teen in custody, and a stretch of the city on alert well into the night.