Craig Wilson is the editor of the Hill & Lake Press. He lives in Lowry Hill.
An East Isles couple is grappling with shock and frustration after a stray bullet pierced their kitchen window earlier this month, narrowly missing one of them and their dogs. The incident, which took place around 8:20 p.m. on the evening of Dec. 17, 2025.
Quenton Courts said he was not home at the time, but his husband, Preston, was sitting in the living room with their dogs when he heard glass shatter. Startled, he ran toward the kitchen. “He noticed there was glass on the floor and was just instantaneously puzzled,” Courts said. “Then he looked at the window and saw two bullet holes.”
Shards of glass were scattered across the room, and a single bullet lay on the floor. The projectile appeared to have traveled in a steep downward angle. “It came basically from the direction of our neighbor’s house, but from a vertical direction, like standing above the house,” Courts said.
Neither Preston nor the neighbors heard gunfire. After calling the neighbor to confirm, Preston dialed 911.
When officers arrived, they were immediately struck by the angle of the entry. The bullet had come from the southeast side of the home in a trajectory police said could not have been fired by anyone on the street or from ground level. Officers quickly identified it as a “flyer,” a term used for a bullet fired from far away that travels unobstructed in an arc before landing elsewhere.
Police told the couple that Preston’s call came in at the exact same moment ShotSpotter technology detected gunfire at 28th Street and Pleasant Avenue in the Whittier neighborhood near, roughly a mile and a half away. The city’s crime dashboard later showed three related activations: the ShotSpotter alert, Preston’s 911 call, and a separate report of shots fired near the same intersection.
Inside the kitchen, the bullet’s path was chilling. Officers told the couple the bullet entered at abdomen height, crossed the center of the room—where the couple regularly prepares meals—and struck the trim of the basement door at knee level on the opposite side. “They said he was really fortunate he wasn’t in the room at the time,” Courts said. “Or our dogs, because one of them would have been shot.”
This is not the couple’s first brush with unpredictable danger. “This is two years after we experienced a car randomly flying over the median, taking out three sections of our fence and landing in our neighbor’s dining room, and tossing a gun into our yard,” Courts said. “We bought a lottery ticket after this one.”
But the ongoing stress adds up. “It raises questions about livability,” Courts said. “Since moving to Minneapolis in 2021, we’ve tried to channel our energy in positive ways. I’ve been on the East Isles Neighborhood Association since 2022, volunteering and leading programming. But as millennial homeowners in the city, we often stop and question the value of living here. We love our neighbors and we love old houses and we love what Minneapolis could be, but it’s been four pretty exhausting years after we’ve also captured a carjacking and multiple auto and property thefts all from our video doorbell.”
He paused before adding: “We’re just kind of tired.”
Police collected the bullet, and the investigation remains open. The couple noted that officers handled the situation with empathy and professionalism.
