A man found dead in a burning trailer house in Minnesota has been linked to a van found in the Cedar River today, and two people are under arrest in Linn County in connection with the case. J
John Ellickson is Public Safety Director in the Minneapolis suburb of New Brighton. He says they got a fire call to a trailer in New Brighton, and after they put it out firefighters found a man’s body inside. He’s identified as Douglas Miller and the chief says they’ve determined trauma to the body was caused by violence, not by the fire. They handled it from there as a homicide.
One element of the case was a missing business vehicle that belonged to the victim, and today (Friday) it was recovered in the Cedar River in central Iowa. There were also two “persons of interest” in the case and the public-safety chief says the two have been taken into custody and Minnesota investigators are on the way to talk to them.
The victim, Douglas Miller, worked for a fire and security alarm company, and the van spotted by a fisherman near Palo about 8 this morning had company markings on it that sent local authorities to contact the Minnesota cops. Ellickson says the two arrested in Linn County were a man and a boy who’d been staying with the dead man in Oak Grove Mobile Home Park in New Brighton. They had a tip the two might have been from Iowa. They’d apparently been befriended by the dead man and been living with him.
Ellickson says they don’t yet know how he died, but confirms they’d been looking for the two arrested in Iowa from the start of the investigation. Police divers came to help pull the stolen van from the Cedar River west of Cedar falls about 11 this morning.