Vance Boelter, the man accused of a deadly attack in Minnesota, recently worked extracting eyeballs from corpses at a funeral home, according to a friend.

Boelter — a 57-year-old married father who allegedly murdered Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and injured another elected official and his spouse early Saturday — was performing organ donation procedures, revealed friend and occasional roommate David Carlson.

“I knocked on his door around 7 p.m. Friday, asking, ‘Hey Vance, are you there?’” Carlson recalled, just hours before the incident.

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“He told me, ‘Yeah, I’m in bed, trying to rest for work,’” Carlson said from his home in Minneapolis where Boelter had been renting a room.

“He’d always say, ‘I need rest to stay sharp,’ because he was doing eyeball extractions. You need to be sharp for that,” Carlson added.

Boelter, who previously worked in food services and managed at a 7-Eleven, often went to sleep early to be on call for work. On the night of the killings, he was on a 12-hour on-call shift from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

This shift coincided with the time he allegedly murdered Rep. Hortman at her Brooklyn Park home and attempted to target State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife nearby.

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His mortuary science studies in 2023 and 2024 at an Iowa community college came to light, with a DMACC representative confirming enrollment. It’s unclear if classes were attended in person or online, due to privacy laws, according to the college.

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Latest updates on Vance Boelter’s arrest:

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Boelter hasn’t been a DMACC student since 2024, the college confirmed. Before the arrest, he worked at a funeral home in Savage, a suburb south of Minneapolis, until leaving voluntarily in February.

Metro First Call Funeral Home issued a statement expressing condolences to the families affected, noting Boelter’s employment there from August 2023 until his departure in February 2025. Read more here.