Hate Crimes · September 19, 2026
A 25-year-old Deer River, Minnesota man is jailed on $100,000 bail after prosecutors say he hurled homophobic slurs at a stranger in a Duluth bar bathroom, then stabbed him repeatedly with a broken bottle — an attack the county’s own prosecutor says appears “based solely on a cursory and incorrect assessment of the person’s sexual orientation.” Whether Minnesota’s hate-crime sentencing enhancement gets added to the case is still being decided.
Key Facts
- Kyle Eugene Heisler Jr. faces felony second-degree assault with a dangerous weapon, threats of violence, and obstructing the legal process over the September 13 attack at Ace’s Bar.[1]
- The 37-year-old victim suffered a punctured kidney and multiple stab wounds; police arrested Heisler about four minutes after the initial dispatch call.[1]
- Judge Nathan LaCoursiere set unconditional bail at $100,000 and denied supervised release.[1]
- Nationally, the FBI recorded 10,881 hate crime incidents in 2025, a 7% drop from 2024’s 11,679 — but sexual-orientation-based incidents still made up 14.5% of all single-bias hate crimes.[3]
The Story So Far
According to charges filed in St. Louis County, Heisler confronted the victim and a friend in the men’s restroom at Ace’s Bar just after midnight on September 13, made homophobic remarks, then attacked the victim with a broken bottle, causing a 2-to-3-inch slash wound and several puncture wounds, one of which punctured his kidney. The victim was hospitalized. Police responded within minutes of the 12:10 a.m. dispatch call and took Heisler into custody at the scene.[2]
What the Prosecutor Said
Mr. Heisler’s conduct evinces a willingness to resort to extreme violence with very little motivation.
— St. Louis County prosecutor Mike Ryan, describing Heisler as a danger to “virtually anyone who crosses his path.”[1]
The enhancement Ryan is weighing comes from the statute itself, not from a separate “hate crime” charge — Minnesota folds bias motivation into the sentence for the underlying assault rather than charging it as its own crime:
A person who violates section 609.221, 609.222, or 609.223 in whole or in substantial part because of the victim’s or another person’s actual or perceived race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, or disability as defined in section 363A.03, or because of the victim’s actual or perceived association with another person or group of a certain actual or perceived race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, national origin, or disability as defined in section 363A.03, is subject to a statutory maximum penalty of 25 percent longer than the maximum penalty otherwise applicable.
— Minnesota Statutes § 609.2233[5]
Ryan told the Duluth News Tribune that pursuing this enhancement is “certainly on my radar,” but that part of the investigation is “still ongoing.”[1] No hate-crime enhancement has been formally added as of this writing — the current charges are the underlying assault and related counts, with the bias-motivation question still under review.
The National Numbers: A Mixed Picture
The Duluth case lands against a national hate-crime picture that’s more complicated than “up” or “down.” The FBI’s 2025 data, released August 14, 2026, shows a real overall decline — but not evenly, and not for every group:
| Category | 2024 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| All hate crime incidents | 11,679 | 10,881 | −7% |
| Anti-Black incidents | 3,455 | 3,262 | −6% |
| Anti-Jewish incidents | — | 1,528 | 63% of religion-based crimes |
| Anti-Asian incidents | — | 318 | 2x the 2013–18 average |
| Murder/manslaughter hate crimes | 10 | 17 | +70% |
Source: FBI 2025 hate crime statistics (released August 14, 2026); Southern Poverty Law Center analysis of the same release.[3][4]
Sexual-orientation bias alone accounted for 14.5% of all single-bias victims in 2025, with gender-identity bias adding another 4.6% — nearly a fifth of all reported hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people specifically, even as the raw national total fell.[3]
What’s Disputed or Unconfirmed
Whether Heisler will actually face a hate-crime sentencing enhancement is unresolved — the prosecutor’s own words describe it as still under investigation, not decided. Separately, national hate-crime statistics are widely understood by researchers to undercount actual incidents, since FBI data depends on local law enforcement agencies choosing to report bias-motivation coding at all; a falling national number is consistent with either fewer incidents or continued underreporting, and this case doesn’t resolve which — a point HRC has also raised about this same FBI release.[7]
How to Verify This Yourself
- The Duluth News Tribune’s original reporting, with direct prosecutor quotes: duluthnewstribune.com.
- The FBI’s own 2025 hate crime statistics release: justice.gov.
- SPLC’s analysis of the same FBI release, for the category breakdowns in the table above: splcenter.org.
- The bias-crime sentencing statute itself, on the Minnesota Revisor’s own site: revisor.mn.gov.[5]
- PinkNews’s independent reporting on the same case: thepinknews.com.[6]
What You Can Do Right Now
- If you witness or experience a bias-motivated attack, report it to local police and ask explicitly that it be coded as a possible hate crime — under-reporting at the local level is a documented gap in the national data.
- Minnesota residents can find victim support and legal resources through OutFront Minnesota, the state’s LGBTQ advocacy organization.
- Court records in this case are public; the docket will show whether a hate-crime enhancement is formally added as the investigation continues.
Kemetic Minds Analysis
The most useful number in the FBI’s own table isn’t the 7% overall decline — it’s the murder and non-negligent-manslaughter count, which rose from 10 to 17 cases even as the total incident count fell. That split matters: a national hate-crime rate can go down on paper while the violence that does occur gets more severe, and the Duluth case — a bottle used as a weapon, a punctured kidney, a hospitalization — fits that more troubling half of the pattern, not the declining half. Ryan’s own description of Heisler as a danger to “virtually anyone who crosses his path” is also worth sitting with: it’s a prosecutor explicitly separating the defendant’s general dangerousness from the specific bias motivation, which is exactly the distinction Minnesota’s enhancement statute requires prosecutors to prove separately rather than assume. Whether that enhancement gets added will say more about how seriously local prosecutors pursue bias-crime law in practice than the national statistics can.
References
- Duluth News Tribune. (2026, September). Duluth bar stabbing suspect believed victim was gay, charges say [Secondary]. duluthnewstribune.com. ↩
- Hoodline. (2026, September). Duluth Ace’s Bar Stabbing Could Bring Hate Crime Charge [Secondary]. hoodline.com. ↩
- U.S. Department of Justice / FBI. (2026, August 14). Hate Crime Statistics, 2025 [Primary]. justice.gov. ↩
- Southern Poverty Law Center. (2026). Overall number of hate crimes declines, but communities continue to be targeted [Secondary]. splcenter.org. ↩
- Office of the Revisor of Statutes, State of Minnesota. Minnesota Statutes § 609.2233 — Felony Assault Motivated by Bias; Increased Statutory Maximum Sentence [Primary, statute text]. revisor.mn.gov. ↩
- PinkNews. (2026, September 18). Duluth Bar Stabbing May Face Hate Crime Charges: Prosecutor [Secondary]. thepinknews.com. ↩
- Human Rights Campaign. (2025). New FBI Data: Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Crimes Continue to Spike Even as Overall Crime Rate Declines [Tertiary, advocacy-org analysis]. hrc.org.
Related Reading
- LGBTQ Nation’s coverage of the same case (not independently re-verified for this piece; the outlet blocks automated fetches).
- Kemetic Minds: Four states enact voting rights acts in one year.
Investigative methodology: the case details and quotes above are drawn verbatim from the Duluth News Tribune’s and Hoodline’s reporting; the statistics table is built directly from the FBI’s own 2025 release and SPLC’s published analysis of it, with no figure estimated. The “Kemetic Minds Analysis” section above is this newsroom’s own interpretation, clearly separated from the sourced reporting it follows.