Nanette Marie Haghi, a 46-year-old White woman, died in the earliest hours of Aug. 16, 2014, after a violent encounter on Minneapolis’ East Franklin Avenue corridor. Near about 2:20 a.m., police were called to the area around Franklin Avenue between 4th and 5th avenues South, where she was found on the ground with a stab wound to the chest. She was rushed to Hennepin County Medical Center, but the injury proved fatal, and her death was ruled a homicide.
In the first frantic minutes after the attack, the scene was described as a struggle—witnesses reported seeing her fighting with a man, and then watching him run as she fell. The medical examiner’s report later documented that the wound was to the chest, and investigators treated the stretch of street and bridge approach as both a crime scene and a trail: what happened was sudden, public, and close enough to passersby that people nearby tried to help while emergency responders were on the way.
For years, the case lingered in the city’s files, shaped by the hard realities of Haghi’s life on the margins—people who knew her described a woman who could be bright and generous even while caught in cycles of addiction and street survival. Friends and relatives were left with the same unanswered question that often follows violence against the unhoused: who decided her life could be taken in the open, and then disappear into the night.
A decade later, investigators announced a major turn. In June 2025, Laru Curls was charged in Hennepin County District Court with second-degree murder in connection with Haghi’s stabbing, and authorities said a warrant had been issued as they pursued the case across state lines. The criminal complaint described two people in a vehicle who saw a man and a woman walking in the middle of Franklin Avenue above I-35W, then tussling over a bag; it alleged the man made a stabbing or jabbing motion before fleeing on foot, while the witnesses called 911 and stayed to assist the victim.
What tied the old street violence to a named suspect was, according to the complaint, a blood trail in the direction the attacker ran—evidence collected in 2014 that did not speak loudly enough at the time, but eventually did. Investigators preserved a sample, and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension later learned that DNA from that blood matched a profile in the National DNA Index System associated with Curls. By the time detectives tracked him down, he was already imprisoned in New York after a 2022 conviction for attempted murder as a hate crime; when investigators interviewed him in May 2025 and told him about the 2014 killing, he reportedly said he’d been in jail and shut down further questioning.
