The child’s mother said investigators told her her son was shot while asleep before his father took his own life in the same bed.
DETROIT LAKES, Minn. — The mother of a 3-year-old boy killed in a Becker County murder-suicide says investigators told her the child was shot in his sleep before his father climbed into bed beside him and fatally shot himself.
That account, offered by Kristi Frazier in interviews with local television news, turned a brief sheriff’s statement into a story of intimate family loss. Authorities have identified the dead as Gene Russell Bartnes, 45, and his son, Koltyn Wayne Bartnes, and have ruled the child’s death a homicide and the father’s a suicide. Investigators have not publicly discussed motive, but Frazier said Bartnes left behind three notes and that police took them as part of the case.
Frazier’s description of the aftermath centered not on police procedure first, but on the phone call that shattered her understanding of an ordinary day. She said investigators told her Koltyn had been shot in the back while sleeping. After that, she said, Bartnes crawled into bed next to the child and shot himself in the chest. Frazier said she learned that Bartnes had left three suicide notes, one meant for her, one for law enforcement and one apologizing for what he had done. She told reporters she had not been able to read them because police confiscated the documents during the investigation. The funeral, she said, had been placed on hold as the family waited for authorities and tried to absorb what had happened.
Only after those family disclosures did the broader public record begin to fill in. The Becker County Sheriff’s Office said deputies were called at about 12:39 p.m. March 30 to a home on County Road 113 in Holmesville Township after Bartnes’ brother became concerned when he did not show up for work. The brother went to the house first and found Bartnes dead, according to authorities. Deputies then entered and found Koltyn dead as well. The next day, officials publicly identified both victims and said the scene appeared isolated, with no known threat to the public. The Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office classified the boy’s death as a homicide and the father’s as a suicide, and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension crime lab joined the investigation.
Frazier also told reporters that people around Bartnes had noticed something unusual before the killings. She said her landlord told her Bartnes had seemed off when he saw him before his death. Even so, her comments suggested a gap between signs of distress and any expectation of lethal violence. Authorities have not said how long the father and son had been alone at the house before the shootings, when the gun was fired or whether anyone else had recent contact with Bartnes before he missed work. Those unknowns matter because they define the narrow space between everyday life and a crime that left a child dead in his bed.
The pain of the loss also spilled into the public through a fundraiser created for Frazier and her family. The page described Koltyn as a beautiful 3-year-old boy and portrayed Frazier as a day care provider known in her community. In practical terms, the fundraiser became one of the first public signs of what came next for the survivors: funeral arrangements delayed, family members speaking through tears and a local community trying to respond to something with no easy explanation. The page did not answer the questions investigators still hold, but it showed how quickly a criminal investigation can become a story about who is left behind and how a parent tries to speak about a child after the most violent kind of loss.
There is also a deeper legal backdrop. Court records cited by Minnesota news outlets show Bartnes had pleaded guilty in 2023 to a misdemeanor domestic assault charge after punching his fiancée’s 17-year-old son in the same home. He received unsupervised probation, and those records indicate the probation period had ended only shortly before the March 30 deaths. The current investigators have not connected that earlier case to the killing of Koltyn, but the overlap in place and timing has added another layer to a case already marked by private trauma and sparse official explanation.
For now, the public picture is split between two kinds of record: the formal findings of law enforcement and the anguished account of a mother trying to explain how her son died. The official investigation is still open, and the family is still waiting to bury the child at the center of it.
Author note: Last updated April 21, 2026.