Who was Umbrella Man, who smashed windows before ‘first fire’ in 2020 Minneapolis protests?

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He was dressed entirely in black — wearing a respirator mask and carrying a black umbrella.

He scrawled a message on the double red doors in white spray paint with an expletive, saying the AutoZone had free stuff for everyone.

Then he smashed the windows, one after the other, with a hammer. People began looting the building. Somebody set it on fire.

It was May 27, 2020, two days after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd. Before the person in black — who became known as Umbrella Man — broke those windows, the protests had been relatively peaceful, according to an affidavit written by Minneapolis arson detective Erika Christensen.

“This was the first fire that set off a string of fires and looting throughout the precinct and the rest of the city,” Christensen wrote. “The actions of this person created an atmosphere of hostility and tension.”

Footage of Umbrella Man was swiftly shared online. So were theories about his identity — some said he was an undercover cop, others were convinced he was a white supremacist. But who was he really?

A reader recently reached out to Curious Minnesota, the Minnesota Star Tribune’s reader-powered reporting project, to ask for the latest information on Umbrella Man’s identity.

Five years after Lake Street burned, officials have shared more questions than answers with the public about Umbrella Man.

The most recent public communication from the FBI about the suspect was in 2022. The agency released five new images of Umbrella Man and asked the public for help identifying him. In the photos, he’s wearing a backwards baseball cap with a yellow logo. Most show him from behind, and in the one that was taken from the front, he’s covered by a face mask and glasses.

Still, authorities have debunked some theories and released information that seemed to support others. And some who took part in the protests have come to believe the answer is simpler than it first seemed.

One of the first theories to be officially debunked suggested that Umbrella Man was a St. Paul police officer.

On Twitter (now called X), an account called @GypsyEyedBeauty named the cop as the “culprit” and shared screenshots of texts supposedly sent by his ex-wife identifying him.

By May 29, the morning after the (now deleted) post was made, it had garnered 104,000 likes and nearly 43,000 reposts. Later that evening, the official account for the St. Paul Police Department acknowledged the conspiracy theory with a tweet.

“We’ve seen it. We’ve looked into it. And it’s false,” it read.

On June 8, the city of St. Paul sent out a news release with security camera footage showing that the officer was at the Richard H. Rowan Public Safety Training Center in St. Paul during the time that the Umbrella Man vandalized the AutoZone.

He didn’t leave the training center until 6:38 p.m., roughly 6 minutes after the windows at the AutoZone were smashed, according to the release.

“Which means there is no way [the officer] is ‘Umbrella Man’,” it read.

Later that summer, Christensen, the arson investigator, applied for a warrant to access the cellphone of a suspect linked to a white supremacist group. (The Minnesota Star Tribune is not naming the man because he has not been charged.)

According to the affidavit, the suspect was a member of the Hell’s Angels and a known associate of the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a prison gang based out of Minnesota and Kentucky.

Christensen learned about him from a tipster who sent an email claiming he was Umbrella Man, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit also linked him to a June Stillwater incident. A group of bikers wearing Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood leather vests had been harassing a Muslim woman. The suspect was photographed among them.

District Judge Luis Bartolomei approved a warrant to seize his cellphone information on July 20, 2020. No charges were brought against him.

A number of posts remain on X naming him as the Umbrella Man, including one that has been reposted more than 8,000 times.

Neither the suspect nor Christensen could be reached for comment. The Minneapolis Police Department did not provide comment on the warrant or the investigation.

The day after the incident, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison called for help identifying Umbrella Man in a tweet linking to the original video.

“This man doesn’t look like any civil rights protestor I have ever seen,” Ellison wrote. “Looks like a provocateur.”

Gov. Tim Walz also claimed that the vast majority of rioters came from outside Minnesota. Ultimately, though, only four out of 20 people charged in Minnesota’s federal court for participating in the riots were from out of state.

At the time, many were convinced that Umbrella Man — and the others most responsible for violence and destruction — were outside agitators.

“‘It’s not even our people.’ I can’t tell you how many times I heard that,” said journalist Niko Georgiades, co-founder of the independent media company Unicorn Riot. “And I can’t tell you how many times that I saw it wasn’t a white supremacist” setting fires.

“It’s disrespectful to say that the community wouldn’t have a reason” to burn things down, Georgiades said.

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