#Body found in Minneapolis pawnshop that was torched in George Floyd protests

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Max It Pawn was burned down during the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis.
Steel Brooks/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

A charred body was found in the wreckage of a Minneapolis pawnshop this week — nearly two months after the building was burned down in the protests that followed George Floyd’s police-custody death.

Investigators were acting on a tip when they found the man’s body in the rubble of Max It Pawn on East Lake Street in south Minneapolis, Police Department spokesman John Elder told The Star Tribune.

“The body appears to have suffered thermal injury and we do have somebody charged with setting fire to that place,” Elder told the paper.

The man’s identity was not immediately released pending the results of an autopsy, which will determine the specific cause and manner of death.

The details and precise timeline of the man’s death are not completely clear, but a police news release obtained by the paper suggested he died in the blaze that destroyed the pawnshop on May 28.

Montez Terrill Lee, 25, of Rochester, Minn., was hit with a federal arson charge last month in connection to that blaze.

The shop is several blocks east of the police department’s Third Precinct station house, which was set ablaze that same night in an explosion of anger over Floyd’s death three days earlier.

Floyd died after Minneapolis Officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck, with the assist of three other cops, during his arrest. All four officers have been fired and charged with felonies.