WATKINS, Minn. – Alayna Ertl lived the carefree lifestyle of a 5-year-old vintage in a small, important Minnesota metropolis. She swung a hula hoop around her small frame and rode a bicycle on metropolis sidewalks outside her tan-sided residence. She followed around a cousin a few
years older, whom she loved. “Laynie,” as family participants knew her, was a giggly and now and again silly female who loved to wear skirts and jewelry, a relative stated, but additionally cherished playing with her older brother on move-cart-type vehicles their father built. It’s unfathomable to people in this stoplight-unfastened metropolis of fewer than 1,000 citizens that the lady should come to be the sufferer of a homicide.
It is incomprehensible that the accused culprit is a man from her circle of relatives, considered a friend, a person whom many on the town came to understand as he spent Friday nights this summer season playing softball on Alayna’s dad’s team and tipping back some drinks in the local bars.
“Anyone just wants to know why,” Chris Cates stated as she stood close to Stein’s Thriftway Foods counter, the local grocery store wherein she works. “What possesses someone that’s an own family friend? That’s the main question that’s placing over the city.”
It’s a query reverberating during the state, too, as 25-year-old Zachary T. Anderson of Monticello sat inside the Crow Wing County jail Monday on, in all likelihood, purpose murder and kidnapping. Formal expenses are predicted Tuesday in Cass County, where Ertl’s frame changed into discovered Top Theto.
Alayna became the last visible when she turned into the positioned mattress at 2 a.m. on Saturday. Authorities stated that her mom, Kayla Ertl, found she lacked at eight a.M. Anderson, who changed into staying over at the Ertls’ home, was also gone, in conjunction with a pickup truck belonging to Matt Ertl, Alayna’s father.
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The government observed the truck that was missing about 8 hours afterward at a property owned by Anderson’s family in Cass County. No one changed inside the car or in a cabin at the property near Motley, about 80 miles north of Watkins. Authorities used dogs to sing.
Anderson to a wooded vicinity 440 yards from the cabin, positioned numerous miles down a gravel road from the entrance to Barren Region Park, a collection of small houses and trailer homes nestled amongst tall timber. Alarmed, Anderson no longer fled or resisted arrest and furnished facts that led the government to Alayna’s frame in a swampy region some hundred yards from the cabin. An initial autopsy by using the Ramsey County medical expert said Alayna died of “homicidal violence.” As of Monday afternoon, the house and surrounding belongings have been cordoned off with yellow tape that reads, “Sheriff’s line do not cross.”
Looking for answers
When you consider that Alayna’s body turned into located, a circulate of friends and own family participants carrying balloons, filled animals, and different gifts have regarded on the Ertls’ domestic. It sits a stone’s throw from the Catholic church in which Alayna could be remembered at a funeral on Friday morning. Neighbors halted approaching reporters, pronouncing that they and the family wanted privacy.
Inside Gordie’s bar on Primary Street, where Anderson occasionally went with Matt Ertl and others after softball video games, instructor Kendria Kramer shook her head Monday. In a small, tight-knit community, speculation often spreads speedily about what may have led to something so tragic. But humans in Watkins, she stated, are stunned.
