St. Louis Park Teen's Trials to Proceed Separately

The Iowa Supreme Court will not review a motion to combine the trials of a St. Louis Park teenager accused of killing two store clerks in November, according to a local newspaper.

The Messenger newspaper in Fort Dodge, Iowa, reports that the order was filed Thursday. This came after the attorney for Michael Richard Swanson, 18, filed a request for the high court to review a district court ruling that also denied merging the two trials.

Swanson faces first-degree murder charges in both Kossuth and Humboldt counties. On Nov. 15, the teenager allegedly stole his mother's vehicle in St. Louis Park, then drove to Iowa, where he shot and killed shot the two clerks — Vicky Bowman-Hall, 47, and Sheila Myers, 61 — in separate robbery attempts. Police believe that both clerks complied with his demands for cash and cigarettes, but he shot them anyway to keep the clerks from calling the police.

Swanson had enrolled at St. Louis Park High School on Nov. 8,  just five days after being released from the Hennepin County Home School, a residential treatment center for adolescent offenders. He had been sentenced there in the summer for stealing a vehicle in St. Louis Park and then crashing it while drunk.

According to city records, police had visited the Swanson family home 10 times since 2005, including five times during 2010. Those calls involved reports of theft, assault, a missing person, vehicle theft, a weapons violation and shots fired.