A dead body has been recovered in the remains of a burned-down Minneapolis pawnshop that was torched during the protests following George Floyd’s death.
According to this, a charred body of a man was located in the rubble of Max It Pawn after police received a tip. The store, located on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis, had been looted and burned to the ground on May 28.
While investigators haven’t yet determined the exact cause and date of the man’s death, police have suggested he was in the building when it was burned due to evidence of “thermal injury.”
“The body appears to have suffered thermal injury and we do have somebody charged with setting fire to that place,” Police Department spokesman John Elder said, adding that police will publicly release more details when they have them.
Montez Terrill Lee, 25, was federally charged with arson last month for setting the fire that destroyed the store.
The Star Tribune reports that firefighters at the time had searched a nearby liquor store that had also been burned on a tip that someone hadn’t made it out of the fire, but that the initial search didn’t turn up a body. Police are now questioning whether the missing person from that store, who was never identified, may be connected to the body that was found in the torched pawn shop.