Inset: Steven Stahlberg (Wright County Sheriff’s Office). Background: The Meadows Mobile Home Community in Monticello, Minn. (Google Maps).
A Minnesota man was charged with murder after police said an argument over a family pet turned violent.
Steven Stahlberg, 48, is in custody at the Wright County Jail after being charged with second-degree murder. According to a criminal complaint reviewed by Law&Crime, police responded to a home in the Meadows Mobile Home Community in Monticello, Minnesota, on the morning of Sept. 3 and found 57-year-old Daniel Ferdelman dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. Ferdelman’s girlfriend placed the 911 call after finding him “lying in bed with blood all over.”
The woman told police that Ferdelman had been fighting with Stahlberg, her brother, who lived with the couple.
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According to the complaint, Ferdelman’s girlfriend told police that Ferdelman called her while she was at work at 12:15 a.m. Ferdelman told her that Stahlberg had taken the couple’s new cat into his bedroom with him and “barricaded” himself in the room with the cat. The girlfriend said Ferdelman told her that Stahlberg eventually emerged from his room with the cat and shoved Ferdelman, who shoved Stahlberg back. Ferdelman told his girlfriend that Stahlberg was “drunk and belligerent.”
Ferdelman told his girlfriend that Stahlberg then took hold of the cat and barricaded himself in his bedroom again.
Ferdelman called his girlfriend again to tell her that Stahlberg had “barged” into his bedroom and started a fight with him. The girlfriend told police that Ferdelman said if Stahlberg “pushed or hit” him again, “someone was going to get hurt.”
Police said Ferdelman’s girlfriend told them that she knew her brother was “intoxicated” and that if he and her boyfriend got into another fight, “it would not end well.”
By the time the woman got back to her home, Ferdelman was dead — and Stahlberg was gone. The woman told police that Stahlberg was most likely headed to their father’s home “to kill their father.” A reason was not provided in the complaint for why Stahlberg might target his father.
According to the complaint, police identified a Toyota Tundra pickup truck that belonged to Stahlberg. A neighbor’s surveillance video captured a man getting into the same pickup and leaving Stahlberg’s home at 1:18 a.m.
Police in the neighboring county caught up with Stahlberg in his pickup at 9:45 a.m. A loaded shotgun was found on the front passenger-side floorboard.
Stahlberg was charged with second-degree murder and is being held on $1 million bond with conditions or $2 million without conditions. He is scheduled to appear in court again on Sept. 21.
The post Man blew away his sister’s boyfriend after arguing about a cat then left with a shotgun to kill their dad: Police first appeared on Law & Crime.
