Todd Stevens, 46, a white man from New Brighton, Minnesota, was killed on the evening of May 5, 2014, when a long-running feud with the neighbors across the street finally spilled out into the open air. The argument that night started outside the homes on Knollwood Drive, where voices rose in the way they had before—accusations and resentment built over years, often circling back to something that sounds almost ordinary until you see what it became: disputes over feeding deer and the trouble those deer supposedly brought with them. 
As the confrontation sharpened, Paula Zumberge was outside, facing Stevens and his girlfriend, Jennifer Damerow-Cleven. Then Neal Zumberge emerged and opened fire, shooting Stevens and then turning the gun on Damerow-Cleven as she arrived or moved into view in the chaos. The shots hit fast and hard, the kind of violence that makes a neighborhood feel unreal in an instant—yards and driveways that had been familiar for years suddenly turned into a crime scene while frantic 911 calls brought police and paramedics racing in. Stevens died from his wounds; Damerow-Cleven survived, injured. 
Investigators and prosecutors painted the killing as the climax of escalating hostility rather than a spontaneous snap. In court, the case leaned on a detailed reconstruction of the moments outside the houses, including evidence from a surveillance camera that captured critical movements just before the gunfire, and testimony about the bitter history between the households. The state pursued severe charges against Neal Zumberge, including first-degree premeditated murder for Stevens’ death and attempted murder related to the shooting of Damerow-Cleven. 
The fallout extended beyond the shooter himself. Paula Zumberge was also charged—accused of fueling the violence and, according to the complaint summarized in reporting, urging her husband during the attack. Her case went to trial separately and ended with an acquittal, the judge finding her not guilty of the charges tied to Stevens’ death. 
Neal Zumberge’s trial ended in August 2015 with a jury convicting him on all counts, including first-degree murder. A month later, in September 2015, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At sentencing, he acknowledged he had lied on the witness stand—an admission that only deepened the grim impression prosecutors had pushed from the start: that this was not an accident or a split-second mistake, but a deliberate choice that ended a man’s life in front of his home. 
