A 27-year-old Minnesota father, Levi Axtell, killed an elderly man he believed was sexually abusing children. He drove from the North Shore home of his victim to the Sheriff’s Office and turned himself in.
In 2018, Axtell said that Lawrence V. Scully followed his 22-month-old daughter while she was being walked from her day care in Grand Marais. He said that Scully did this by parking his van close to the day care center while closely monitoring his daughter.
In the request put forward by Axtell in 2018, he wrote;
“He has been there many times stalking children in his van,” Axtell wrote in a request for the court to issue an order for protection. “He is a convicted pedophile, and him stalking and attempting to groom my daughter is completely inappropriate and needs to stop.”
Court records show that the request was granted temporarily and then denied after a few weeks.
About two years later, Axtell posted on Facebook a picture of someone pointing a gun behind the words “The only way to stop pedophiles. A bullet.” He went on to say, “People always ask me why I hate pedophiles. They assume I’ve been abused. But really I think being protective is just an Axtell trait.”
Cook County Sheriff Pat Eliasen said Thursday that Scully was found guilty of sexually assaulting a 6-year-old girl in Kanabec County in 1979. Records from the state Department of Corrections show that Scully got out of prison in 1982. In the early 1980s, Scully moved to the North Shore.
According to the filed criminal complaint and a related court document:
Shortly after 4:45 p.m., a caller told emergency dispatch that he saw someone get out of a minivan and run into Scully’s house on E. 5th Street. The caller heard screams right away and saw the van drive away.
A few minutes later, Axtell drove the van to the Sheriff’s Office, he was already drunk. Bloody, he walked into the lobby and fell down on his knees and “put his hands on his head and said that he had murdered [Scully] with a shovel,” the court filings read.
A sheriff’s deputy found Scully in his house. He was clearly dead because of the serious head wounds.
Axtell told the police that he took the shovel off the deck, hit Scully 15 to 20 times, and “finished him off” with a few more blows from a big moose antler.
He said Scully was someone he had known for a long time; Axtell said that he had seen Scully park the car in places where children were and believed he would reoffend.
The Aftermath
Levi W. Axtell was charged in Cook County District Court with second-degree intentional murder in connection with the death Wednesday afternoon of Lawrence V. Scully in the 77-year-old man’s home just north of Hwy. 61 in Grand Marais, Minn.
Axtell appeared via video from the Cook County jail on as attorneys argued the amount of bail he would need to pay in order to be released while his case was still ongoing.
“This was a brutal attack without provocation on an elderly man,” said County Attorney Molly Hicken, who asked Judge Michael Cuzzo to set bail at $1 million.
Dennis Shaw, the defense attorney, did not request a specific bail amount but stated that his client had no significant criminal history prior to the present allegations.
“Given the nature of the charge, that alone presents a flight risk,” Cuzzo concurred with the prosecution. Axtell remains in jail until his next court appearance on April 10.
Side note: I couldn’t find Lawrence V. Scully’s photograph
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