MINNEAPOLIS — Two cousins who work at a hotel near the Mall of America and one of their friends were charged with felonies Monday accusing them of helping two men escape after one of them fired three rounds inside a crowded mall store.
Denesh Raghubir, 21, of Minneapolis; Selena Raghubir, 23, of Bloomington; and Delyanie Kwen-Shawn Arnold, 23, of Burnsville, were charged with aiding an offender to avoid arrest. They were being held in the Hennepin County jail Monday evening while two suspects remain at large.
Court documents identify the shooter as Shamar Alon Lark, 21, of Minneapolis, who is shown in security videos with Rashad Jamal May, 22, of Burnsville, fleeing a fight between four other individuals that led to Lark firing several shots.
Warrants were issued for May and Lark, who faces a slew of gun charges including second-degree assault, felony discharge of a dangerous weapon and felony possession without a permit. May is charged with aiding an offender.
Lark is on probation for a shooting in September near SE. 26th and Delaware avenues. Responding officers saw Lark and another male flee the area of the shooting, and he was later apprehended while in possession of a firearm. He was charged with carrying a pistol without a permit.
At a Monday afternoon news conference, Bloomington Police Chief Booker Hodges held up driver's license photos of Lark and May.
"You cannot come shoot up a mall and think that you're gonna get away with it. We're not gonna allow that to happen," Hodges said. "Mr. May and Mr. Lark, please turn yourselves in. Please, but understand our detectives and officers are not going to rest until they have you in custody."
According to charging documents:
May drove Lark's vehicle to the mall, arriving around 4 p.m. Thursday. It was left in the parking ramp and towed to the Bloomington Police Department, where officers searched the vehicle and found IDs for both men as well as a handgun holster in the trunk.
Three cartridges were found inside the main entrance of the Nike store after officers responded to the shooting shortly before 4:20 p.m. Security video shows a fight broke out before May and Lark left the store briefly. Lark returned and fired a handgun in the direction of the fight. He then ran out the north doors with May and into the IKEA parking lot where they could no longer been seen on surveillance.
The men were picked up by a Best Western hotel shuttle at IKEA and taken to the hotel just south of the mall. Officers interviewed the bus driver, Raghubir, who told police he dropped them off and last saw them smoking outside the hotel.
Officers obtained a search warrant for May's phone which showed that two minutes after the shooting, he called Arnold, who in return called May five times between 4:20 and 4:23 p.m.
Arnold then called his girlfriend, Selena Raghubir, an assistant manager at the hotel who is a cousin of the shuttle bus driver. The couple exchanged calls with May around 4:30 p.m.
Ten minutes later, the bus driver is shown on surveillance picking up Lark and May at IKEA and dropping them off at the back side of the hotel, where a vehicle registered to Selena Raghubir followed.
Hotel management said that Denesh Raghubir is not the regular shuttle bus driver. He admitted to police that his cousin was friends with May and Lark and he recognized them.
"When he dropped the two off at Best Western, Selena Raghubir immediately left the front desk and he did not see her for about 45 minutes. He stated that Selena Raghubir later called him and asked what time the police left," according to court documents.
Phone records later show May and Arnold at Arnold's Bristol Village address in Bloomington.
The day after the shooting, police executed a search warrant at the Bloomington residence where Arnold lives with Selena Raghubir. Inside her vehicle police found an orange T-shirt May wore and white tank top Lark wore at the time of the shooting.
Police say that the assistance and misinformation provided by Arnold and the Raghubirs "resulted in the flight of Lark and May and the interference in the investigation."
The three remain are in custody and make their first court appearance Tuesday afternoon.
Hodges said that because police believed Lark and May were in the hotel, it was locked down and searched, wasting valuable investigative time.
"We were there for a long time when we could have been looking for them," he said.
Bloomington Mayor Tim Busse praised police in a tweet for their "continued outstanding work" and called the suspects "cowards who fired shots into a crowded store at MOA."
"People with no respect for others, and anyone who helps them, will be held accountable," Busse wrote.
Meanwhile, business was returning to normal at the Mall of America.
Logan Rieger, 28, an assistant manager at the Under Armour store, which was near the shooting, said that there were onlookers Monday checking out the scene, but there were also quite a few who didn't know anything had gone on.
About 75 people ended up crowding in his store when the shots rang out last week, he said. Some huddled behind anything they could to hide. Rieger took the next day off work to "reset." When he returned over the weekend, he said that there was a "noticeable increase" in security.
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(Star Tribune intern Katelyn Vue contributed to this report.)
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