While covering a night of mayhem during Fourth of July celebrations, a local Minneapolis photographer narrowly avoided an explosion mere feet away from him.
At approximately 1:30 a.m., reporters for WCCO, the Minnesota CBS affiliate, were tracking the story of people setting off fireworks and causing trouble in Boom Island Park. While speaking with a local, the camera crew was nearly hit by one of the rogue explosions.
"Watch out! Behind you!" the local exclaimed as the firework set off in front of them.
WCCO later reported that the cameraman, Nick Boeke, was not injured. Reporter Pauleen Le later shared more details regarding the "scary" scenario.
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"Definitely a scary situation to watch. Just to get you another vantage point as to how close that firework was, Where I’m standing right now, this is where Nick was standing early this morning for that interview. Take a look, right over there is the remnants of that firework. That’s where that firework went off. Essentially, you’ve got just a bike lane that separated the firework from where Nick was standing," Le described on the scene. "Again, Nick says that he is okay but you can tell by the sheer magnitude of what you saw and heard in that video how big that firework was."
According to Le’s report, at least a dozen officers from Minneapolis, the Park Police and the Minnesota State Patrol were called in to handle the chaos. They were seemingly able to have the area under control by 2 a.m., though not before some violent interactions with the officers.
"Cops, people fighting and stuff. There were people throwing fireworks at cops and everything it was crazy," a witness said. "Me personally, I haven't done it."
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One year prior, Boom Island Park was the site of another violent Fourth of July when eight people were shot on the scene.
"We were just watching fireworks, and we just heard a whole bunch of shots," Kaayla Laanaee told WCCO-TV. "I just heard them going over my head to the trees. I was just ducking by the lake."
The explosion follows growing concerns over journalists reporting in high crime areas. In a recent memoir, former KSTP-TV news reporter Crystal Bui described shortcomings from her newsroom that instructed her to cover the George Floyd riots in Minnesota.
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"While I was focused on staying safe, managers were focused on ratings...They don't explicitly instruct you to move closer to the danger, but they use code words, and reporters know what they mean," Bui wrote.
