By Mara H. Gottfried
Pioneer Press
BURNSVILLE, Minn. — As the one-year anniversary approaches of the killings of three first responders in Burnsville, the women closest to each of them wondered how they should mark the day that had been the worst of their lives.
Did they want to be at a public memorial in Burnsville ? With friends and family at home?
The widow of firefighter/paramedic Adam Finseth finally decided: Tara Finseth and her husband could never carry out their bucket list together, but she could start bringing their two children to the places they’d dreamed of traveling. She booked a trip so they’d be in a beautiful place on Feb. 18.
Finseth’s choice guided Cindy Elmstrand-Castruita. The wife of Officer Paul Elmstrand also thought the best option would be leaving town with their two young children and looking for solace in the mountains.
Officer Matt Ruge, who wasn’t married, was close with his mom, Christi Henke. She went up north to be with friends and is deciding what she’ll do on Feb. 18.
Before last year, these three women didn’t know each other. Now, they regularly text each other, hold each other’s hands at ceremonies and understand each other’s grief in a way that most people can’t.
It was Feb. 18, 2024, when a gunman opened fire on first responders as they tried to negotiate with him at his Burnsville residence. Police had responded to a 911 call about a domestic disturbance at the home and the man barricaded himself inside with his and his girlfriend’s seven children.
Finseth, 40, and Elmstrand and Ruge, both 27, were killed that day. A Burnsville police sergeant was shot and injured.
“It wasn’t just Adam and Paul and Matt who are heroes,” Henke said recently. “What happened and the heroic actions of everybody that night is beyond people’s imaginations.”
When Ruge was shot a second time, another officer covered him with his own body so Ruge wouldn’t be shot again. Other officers ran into the danger zone to attend to the first responders who were wounded. “They all risked their lives,” Henke said.
Adam Finseth : ‘Hands-on dad’
Before Finseth’s wife and children left for their trip, they went to Burnsville Fire Station 2, where Adam Finseth worked. They moved his backup firefighting gear, which had still been in his locker at the station, to a memorial locker in the station’s lobby.
“It was hard, and I started crying,” Tara Finseth said. The couple’s children — Nora, 9, and Liam, 11 — wrapped their arms around their mom. “They’re both very intuitive when I’m having a hard time,” she said. “They should never have to know this kind of pain and loss, but they do.”
One of the most hurtful parts of losing Adam “is these two beautiful kids we brought into this world lost the best role model,” Tara Finseth said. They saw from him that whether you knew someone or not, “you treat them with kindness and respect,” she said.
“He modeled this career for them of serving people,” she said. And as much as he loved firefighting, his children and wife came first.
When the kids were babies, he’d wake up in the middle of the night with Tara to change their diapers and wash nursing equipment. Even if he had to work the next day, he wanted his wife to get back to sleep.
“He was just that hands-on dad from the very beginning,” she said. As their children grew older, when he’d get home from working a long shift, he’d go to his kids’ sporting events, help them with homework and play baseball with them in the backyard.
“All the things,” she said.
Paul Elmstrand : Wish he could come back
Elmstrand was also a father. He and Elmstrand-Castruita’s children are now 3 years old and nearly 18 months.
The oldest, Maria, went through a period of asking every day how her father died and wanting her mother to tell her the story at bedtime.
“She’s a very, very curious girl, and she’s just very information-seeking,” Elmstrand-Castruita said. “It got a little brutal for me.”
She tells Maria that her father put her and her little brother, Mateo, to bed that night and went to work. “I say: ‘He was doing his job as a police officer when a woman called 911 because her kids weren’t safe. Dada went with other police officers to their house to help them. When he was inside of the house, the bad man decided to hurt Dada. Other police officers got him out and took him to the ambulance and the doctors tried to save him.’”
Maria has asked her, “How did Dada get hurt?” but she hasn’t told her yet that he was shot.
When Elmstrand-Castruita confided in other mom friends about Maria wanting to hear the story daily, they suggested she offer to tell her daughter other stories about Elmstrand. Now, the little girl asks to hear a new story about her father every night at bedtime.
Still, “she’ll say things to me like, ‘I wish he would just come back,’” she said.
Matt Ruge : Humor and kindness
Through all the pain of the last year, Henke has been surrounded by kindness.
On Mother’s Day, Ruge’s friends who are Burnsville officers brought Henke flowers and a card signed by about a dozen of them. “It was very beautiful and touching,” she said.
When Henke moved, Burnsville officers were there again to carry her furniture to her new house.
Feb. 2 would have been Ruge’s 28th birthday. Henke posted a photo of him on Facebook from December 2023 , standing next to a cactus taller than him.
“There’s a funny story behind this picture and it has to do with Matt writing his name on this cactus as a little boy,” she wrote. “It’s hard not to smile seeing his expression in this picture. This is the face I’m going to try to keep in the forefront of my mind as I celebrate Matt on his birthday.”
Speaking recently, Henke said: “Of course, I could remember the hero on his birthday, or I could remember him as a little boy, but I just really wanted to remember how happy he was in the months leading up to his death. And the great man he grew into with his sense of humor and his kindness.”
Three women tied together by tragedy
Henke is grateful for the memorial events that have been held over the last year, but they’re also harrowing. She prepares by talking to Elmstrand’s and Finseth’s widows.
“There’s only a few people that know what the demands do to us of trying to always show up to honor these men,” Henke said.
Recently, the three women attended a ceremony at the Ames Center in Burnsville to accept the police department’s Medal of Honor, given for line-of-duty deaths; last year’s were the first in the city’s history.
The fire department previously named Finseth as Burnsville Firefighter of the Year. At the recent ceremony, Ruge and Elmstrand were posthumously honored as Burnsville Officer of the Year.
During the ceremony, Elmstrand-Castruita was on stage, holding her son in one arm and her daughter’s hand. “I didn’t like that Christi was standing there by herself,” so she rearranged her children and grabbed Henke’s hand. “For me, that connection is important and it’s really meaningful to be there for one another,” Elmstrand-Castruita said.
Getting to know each other has been gradual, but it’s been heartwarming, Tara Finseth said.
“It was really hard in the beginning for me because we didn’t know each other, other than through this terrible, tragic event,” Elmstrand-Castruita said. “It was the singular thing that tied us together.”
When they’ve talked, “it’s really nice to be able to say certain things and then have them just completely understand, and I don’t even have to explain myself,” she said. “They understand how hard this grief is.”
A year of loss
There has been more loss through the last year.
Ruge’s 56-year-old father, Sean Ruge , died unexpectedly in August. He didn’t have a history of heart problems, but he was having trouble breathing and called 911. When first responders arrived, he was holding his son’s badge in his hand and he collapsed, Henke said.
“They say it was from ‘natural causes’ with his heart, but there is nothing natural about my daughter losing her only sibling and father in less than six months,” Henke wrote on social media at the time.
Henke and Sean Ruge were divorced, but they remained friends and spent holidays and birthdays together with their children, Matt and Hannah.
For Elmstrand-Castruita, the hardest parts of the last year have happened more recently: Christmas, Elmstrand’s birthday in December and the time leading up to the one-year anniversary.
“When I first found out Paul was killed, there was shock and adrenaline, but that’s worn off,” she said. “I feel the sadness so much more deeply, and it feels a lot heavier.”
For Tara Finseth, as the one-year mark approaches, “I feel like I’m about to lose a whole other part of him again because right now I can say, ‘A year ago, he was here, and we were doing this as a family,’ and pretty soon that’s going to be taken away from me.”
Her children are processing the loss of their dad in their own ways. Liam “is my quiet observer and thinker,” his mother said. “Nora is our expresser.” She writes letters to her father, draws pictures of him and wears his sweatshirts and coats to school.
“People say time will heal, but with this level of tragedy and loss, with this type of person, it hasn’t yet,” Tara Finseth said. She said she wouldn’t have been able to get through the last year without her friends, family and Adam’s firefighting colleagues and friends. “The community support has been overwhelming in the best way.”
In the courtroom
The women were in court when gunman Shannon Gooden’s live-in girlfriend, Ashley Dyrdahl, pleaded guilty last month to straw purchasing the firearms used in the ambush. Gooden, who died by suicide last Feb. 18, was barred from having guns because of a past felony conviction.
Dyrdahl faced the judge, but Elmstrand-Castruita had hoped to make eye contact with her. She said she’d like to someday have a conversation with Dyrdahl.
“I find it very strange that I have that desire, but I just want to understand what led her to buy guns for a felon,” she said. “I want to understand what her situation was like. I want to have empathy. I want to not just think she’s bad. I want to see her as a human, not just as a monster. And I’m sure she has a story.”
Gooden had a previous domestic assault case against another woman. Dyrdahl had applied for an order for protection against him in 2017, but it was dismissed when she didn’t appear in court.
Elmstrand was part of the police department’s domestic assault response team and told his wife what he learned about domestic violence, so she said she can imagine that Dyrdahl’s life and decisions may have been complicated.
Still, she’s not forgiving of Dyrdahl.
“She didn’t just buy a gun for a felon,” Elmstrand-Castruita said. “She bought a gun for a felon who was clearly unstable, someone she thought could harm people and who ultimately killed three innocent men.”
How they’re spending Feb. 18
Tara Finseth is a registered nurse and took seven months off work after the shootings for her mental health and to be there for her kids. Back at work, her boss asked how many days she’d like to take off around Feb. 18, and she started thinking about her plans.
Family vacations were important because it was the best way the four of them could get uninterrupted time together.
“I have come to a point where I want to take control and start honoring the way Adam lived instead of the way he died,” Finseth said. “The way he lived with us was making memories with the kids.”
She and her mother traveled with the kids to a place that she and Adam had planned to vacation to someday. “I’m going to spend our time together relaxing and doing things he would have loved to do,” she said.
Elmstrand-Castruita has been working part-time at her church, where she also sings. “It’s probably one of the easiest ways for me to express my emotions, and it’s definitely been one of the primary avenues that I can release a lot of these complicated feelings I have and be filled with hope at the same time,” she said.
Elmstrand-Castruita originally thought she’d spend Feb. 18 visiting Elmstrand’s grave and spending time with family.
“I’ve just been feeling this terrible dread as every day would get closer to the 18th,” she said. But talking to Tara Finseth and Henke made her feel she could do something for herself, “rather than being worried about everyone else and how they might experience that day.”
She booked a trip to take her children to Colorado, which she hopes will be a peaceful place. Elmstrand-Castruita has never been, but Elmstrand went when he was younger and loved it. She and Elmstrand wanted to take their children there as they grew older.
‘Still with me’
Elmstrand-Castruita said she’s sought out people who were around Elmstrand to hear what happened before and during the shootings, and wants to talk to everyone she can who was there in his final hours.
“I want to know what his last moments were like because I didn’t get to be there,” she said. “Even if it’s brutal or hard to hear, I’ve always wanted to know exactly what happened.”
At first, Elmstrand-Castruita was mad that her husband responded to the call, but she understands that he couldn’t have stood by — his driving force was helping people.
“I know that Paul understood how dangerous domestic situations can be, and I also know that he was thinking about the fact that there were seven kids in there,” she said. “He was thinking about our kids, and he knew the kids in that house were worth putting your life on the line for.”
She wishes Elmstrand could see how much their kids have grown. He’d also have been proud of her younger brother, who’s an EMT and in the process of becoming a Roseville firefighter.
“Paul had really encouraged him to see what opportunities existed and, after Paul died, I think my brother really doubled down on that being his dream,” she said.
The funeral home arranged to have a ring made with a distinct fingerprint of Elmstrand’s on the surface. Every day, his wife wears it on her wedding ring finger, along with a necklace that contains some of her husband’s ashes.
“It’s become a comfort for me,” Elmstrand-Castruita said. “I’ll rub my necklace because it helps me feel like he’s close. He’s still with me.”
Attending Tuesday’s public memorial, how to help
Feb. 18 has been declared Public Safety Memorial Day in Burnsville to honor the lives of Paul Elmstrand, Matt Ruge and Adam Finseth. The community is invited to gather to remember and honor them:
- Three wreaths will be displayed at Burnsville City Hall , 100 Civic Center Parkway , for 24 hours to allow the community to gather.
- All Burnsville buildings will be lit in blue and red, and the city’s flag will fly at half-mast.
- City council members and city leadership will make public comments at 2 p.m. Feb. 18 at City Hall .
The Minnesota Fraternal Order of Police Foundation is fundraising for family members and police and fire personnel to travel this spring to the National Law Enforcement Memorial and National Fallen Firefighters Memorial. Donations can be made at gofund.me/c592dd92.
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