It started with a man who said he was looking for a lost cellphone in the shallow Apple River — and ended with stabbings that left a Stillwater teen dead and four other tubers with serious injuries.
Now, nearly two years later, murder suspect Nicolae Miu will stand trial beginning Monday for the killing of 17-year-old Isaac Schuman — an act caught on cellphone video — and the wounding of three men and a woman during a chaotic river confrontation in Somerset, Wis.
Witnesses told authorities that Miu, now 54, had been bothering young women and girls on the popular tubing river while he was carrying goggles and a snorkel mask. But Miu said he acted to defend himself after he was attacked while searching for his friend’s lost phone that was in a waterproof floating bag.
The trial will most certainly revolve around the nearly 3½-minute cellphone video taken by Schuman’s friend Jawahn Cockfield. In a recent court filing, St. Croix County District Attorney Karl Anderson wrote “this is a unique case where the homicide is on video” and he contends the footage “rebuts (Miu’s) claims in the interview with investigators, that he was minding his own business when he was attacked, unprovoked.”
St. Croix County Circuit Judge R. Michael Waterman will preside over the trial, which is expected to last 10 days. A question jurors will have to weigh in Miu’s claim of self-defense is this: What would a reasonable person do if confronted with the same situation?
UPDATE: Nicolae Miu found guilty in Apple River homicide, other stabbings
That is the essence of Wisconsin’s self-defense law, said Minneapolis criminal defense attorney Joe Tamburino. Wisconsin does not have a specific duty to retreat as Minnesota does, but it’s part of “reasonability,” he said.
“One of the factors to determine if a person acted in self-defense — were their actions reasonable — is the consideration of could the defendant have avoided it,” said Tamburino, who is not involved in Miu’s case.
If the jury is convinced that Miu, a mechanical engineer from Prior Lake, acted reasonably after being threatened with death or bodily harm, he could be acquitted. If not, Miu could be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“The meat and potatoes of this is: Who started this, and was there an opportunity for (Miu) to leave?” Tamburino said. “And was the force reasonable?”
District Attorney Anderson will be prosecuting Miu on five main charges: first-degree intentional homicide and four counts of attempted first-degree intentional homicide. A misdemeanor battery charge was added after the original criminal complaint was filed two days after the attack.
Miu is represented by two prominent Wisconsin attorneys: Aaron Nelson, who specializes in violent crimes, and Corey Chirafisi, who was co-counsel for Kyle Rittenhouse. Chirafisi helped win not-guilty verdicts for Rittenhouse in 2021 after the then-teenager testified that he fatally shot two men and injured another in self-defense during the civil unrest that followed a police shooting in Kenosha in 2020.
Miu has remained jailed in lieu of a $1 million cash bond since his arrest about a mile downstream from the stabbing site some 90 minutes later.
Caught on video
The confrontation took place around 3:45 p.m. July 30, 2022, some 100 to 200 yards upstream from the Highway 35/64 bridge in Somerset, a community famous for its river tubing, camping and partying.
Sheriff’s deputies found Schuman without vital signs, and with a puncture wound in the upper abdomen near his left breast. He was pronounced dead at Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater.
The other victims — a 24-year-old Burnsville woman, a 22-year-old Elk River man and two Luck, Wis., men ages 20 and 22 — suffered puncture or slash wounds in the abdomen or upper torso. They were taken by air and ground ambulances to Regions Hospital in St. Paul in conditions that ranged from critical to serious.
A folding pocketknife with a black handle and silver blade was found in a closed position along the west bank of the river near where the incident took place.
Witnesses said Miu was bothering a group of floating juveniles who then sought help from others floating nearby. The other group got between Miu and the juveniles and told him to leave, calling him a “child molester” and a “pedophile,” according to statements Miu and his wife gave to investigators.
Miu said that he had drunk “a lot of beer” that day, the complaint says. Miu said he told the group of angry tubers “that if he was a child molester, and they were children, they shouldn’t be drinking alcohol.”
The complaint describes some of the confrontation as captured on video, which begins with Miu running up to Schuman’s group and grabbing onto their tubes. People in the tubing party tell Miu to “get away.” He appears to look for something, walks away, turns back around and says something while pointing at the group.
Miu again walks away toward the bridge, then toward a female. The camera pans, showing more people converging toward Miu and yelling at him to get away. Someone can be heard in the video accusing him of “looking for little girls,” the complaint says.
A larger group converges toward the area. Several people yell at Miu, and it appears that at least one person touches his shoulder. “From the video it does appear to show people on three sides of Nicolae at different distances,” the complaint says. “The video and elapsed time shows opportunity for Nicolae to leave the confrontation.”
Miu appears to be “confronted” by two females. He soon pulls a folding pocketknife from his cargo shorts and holds it at his side with the blade exposed, the video purportedly shows.
The camera briefly pans away from the scene just as it turned violent. When the camera pans back, it shows Miu falling into the water, followed by a young woman slapping him and a male pushing him as Miu tries to get back up.
As the male approaches to shove Miu a second time, Miu apparently stabs him in the stomach. He continues to make stabbing motions as more people approach him, according to the complaint.
As Miu ran away from the confrontation, “there was enough blood in the river that the water turned a red tint in places,” investigators wrote.
Claimed self-defense
Later that day, Miu, a mechanical engineer at Ritchie Engineering Co. in Minneapolis, spoke with sheriff’s Lt. Brandie Hart at length and described his actions as “self-defense.”
Miu said the incident started when someone in the group took his goggles and snorkel and threw them in the river, and someone else “grabbed his swim trunks and tried to pull his trunks down,” the complaint states.
Contrary to what the video appeared to show, Miu denied carrying a knife to the river. Instead, he claimed he had wrestled a knife away from one of the males who confronted him.
“Nic said he then took the knife from the individual who’d been in possession of it, and then started swinging it,” Hart wrote in the complaint. “Nic told me he was swinging the knife all around him because, ‘I wanted out.’ Nic said people were coming at him, punching him, hitting him, and circling around him. Nic said that the group was really close to him and pushing him in the river. Nic said he didn’t know what, if anything, the knife came into contact with.”
Miu told the investigator he didn’t know what happened to the people who confronted him.
“I told Nic that four individuals sustained injuries and one person died,” Hart wrote. “Nic said, ‘Oh no’ and asked if the individuals sustained injuries because they were fighting with each other, and I said I didn’t know. Nic then put his head in his hands and said, ‘Oh my god.’ Nic said his whole life was ‘down the tubes.’ Nic said he was sorry for how this ended up.”
‘No place to go’
The next month, at Miu’s probable cause hearing, Hart said witnesses told her the incident first became violent after Miu “struck a female” in the face. She said the video does not show her being hit, but does show Miu then being pushed into the river, slapped and pushed again. She said he then pulled a knife and stabbed a tuber, which she described as a “jab” that appeared to move up the torso.
The video did not show others being stabbed, but showed Miu making stabbing motions, Hart said. After sounds of screaming, she said, Miu walked back to his wife and other tubers he had been with previously. He did not call 911.
Miu told her “he was attacked and he responded in self-defense,” Hart said. She said he stated he did not have a knife, although his wife later said that he had one with him.
Hart said Miu told her the tubers had brandished two knives, but no other ones were seen in the video besides the one Miu had with him.
Miu’s attorneys laid the groundwork for the self-defense claim. Upon questioning by Chirafisi, Hart said Miu didn’t say anything to the tubers after jogging over to them and did not yell or threaten them. He was not aggressive with them while he was turned away from them, looking for the phone, and they were yelling at him to get away.
“Is he yelling back at them?” Chirafisi asked.
“No,” she replied.
Hart said Miu had not made physical motions toward the six or so tubers who were around him before the altercation became violent.
“There’s no place for him to go at that point, agreed?” Chirafisi asked.
“Yes,” she responded.
Statement ‘didn’t add up’
In Minnesota, a claim of self-defense cannot be used if you are the first aggressor, Tamburino said. In Wisconsin, you can’t use self-defense if you are the person who provokes the attack, “so it’s a small distinction,” he said. “And it’s always a muddied area.”
Tamburino said he’s done more than 100 jury trials and talked to a lot of jurors afterward. “And here’s the biggest thing: Your first statement to police is one of the things they rely on the most, because they want to see if you change your story,” he said. “Your juries hate when people change their stories.”
In that regard, Miu’s own words will be a challenge for his attorneys, Tamburino said.
“Mr. Miu contradicts himself left and right: ‘I don’t have a knife.’ His wife said he had a knife. ‘The other people had knives.’ No other knives were found. ‘I had to take the knife from the other guy.’ That’s not on the video. He’s got a lot of problems with his statement,” he said. “I would imagine that’s one of the main reasons they charged him, because his statement just didn’t add up to the other evidence.”
Although Miu’s actions afterward — leaving the scene, not calling police — are not legal factors, “they will matter to the jury, because when you act in self-defense and you just run, it looks bad,” Tamburino said.
Retired Wisconsin defense attorney Alex Andrea said Miu is allowed to use whatever force is necessary to, as the statute says, “prevent or terminate what the person reasonably believes to be an unlawful interference.”
“What does a person who is using self-defense see, observe, reason from what’s happening?” said Andrea, who worked as a public defender out of the Hudson trial office from 1989 to 2019. “There are great lawyers out there who I respect greatly, and they might talk about another aspect, which is that you read into the statute proportionality. What is a sufficiently proportionate response to the perceived threat or harm?”
Although not necessarily an absolute defense, there is an element of provocation in the case, he said. “How would you react, how would anyone react, to that accusation (of looking at little girls)?” he said. “What is the reaction of the average juror going to be?”
Andrea noted how Miu was thrown into the water twice. “How is he going to know what they are going to do?” he said. “At a certain point, you have to wonder, are they going to let me leave? And did he have a means of egress, of escape? I don’t know.”
The video is important in that it captures what happened in real time, even if it’s only a partial reconstruction of what took place, he said. “But if you don’t, for example, hear what was said between the parties, then for all that it’s showing the jury in real time, it’s not complete, is it?” he said. “And yet, my experience has been, and I’m not alone in this, is juries tend to put a disproportionate amount of weight on a video.”
Last month, Miu’s attorneys moved to have the video excluded after 2 minutes and 25 seconds because the stabbings had happened at that point. In the alternative, they asked that the audio be muted “because it depicts raw, emotional reactions which Mr. Miu believes are unfairly prejudicial,” Judge Waterman wrote in his decision denying the motion.
“The Jawahn Cockfield video is highly probative because it captures Mr. Miu’s early interactions with the tubers, including several of the alleged victims,” the judge wrote. “It establishes time, place and manner for many of the key events, including the fatal stabbing and Mr. Miu’s claim of self-defense. It captures the aftermath of the alleged crimes, including Mr. Miu leaving the scene and the wounded behind, all of which is probative of his intent.”
Muting the audio “after 2:25 is more dangerous than playing it,” the judge wrote. “After watching and listening to more than 2 minutes of intense footage, the jury will wonder why the last 55 seconds of audio needed to be sequestered from their ears. It will invite speculation about what’s missing and the Court’s reasons for excluding it.”
Jury selection for the trial is slated to start at 8 a.m. Monday in St. Croix County Circuit Court in Hudson. Opening statements are expected to begin around 1:30 p.m. Local TV stations are planning to stream the trial live.
