A woman searching for a wedding date found a newspaper photo of her teenage father being held back by police the night his dad was shot

When Heidi Paster went online to track down a single wedding date, she had no idea it would turn up her grandfather’s criminal file. The record reportedly held mug shots, fingerprints, and pages from the FBI’s records on him. There was also newspaper coverage of his killing in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Paster is a New York City photographer and filmmaker who also freelances as a writer. She described the find in a personal essay for Newsweek. The old clippings reportedly showed that someone fired three .38-caliber rounds through a back window, hitting her grandfather. Her father, then 16 and only weeks from turning 17, was there and saw it happen.

The author carried her grandfather’s name, but she knew little about him growing up. When she was small, her family told her that he spent a few stretches in prison. Her grandmother called it “summer camp,” and relatives dismissed his problematic years as small stuff, claiming authorities had singled him out for being Jewish. While the murder itself was no secret, nobody really explained who did it, why, or how it all unfolded.

The family had to deal with media scrutiny for years

Paster’s father liked to tell her never to do anything she wouldn’t want to see printed on a newspaper’s front page. Given the family’s history, the advice took on new meaning. One of the clippings she found showed her father, still a boy, being held back by police outside the house.

A cousin of her father’s apparently explained the situation like this: “Your dad tried to keep the reporters off the property. We never talked about that night. It was too painful.” One of her uncles said the attention was crushing. “The media destroyed us. We got death threats,” he told her.

Other people allegedly taunted the children as “the gangster’s son.” “Your father saw Dad murdered in front of his own eyes, and no one talked about it,” the uncle added.

Her father, who died 12 years before she began this research, shared only one memory of that night with her. He wished he had not left his father’s side before the ambulance pulled up.

Some families go further to keep the past buried, including one woman whose relatives forbade her from taking a 23andMe test. Paster’s search, by contrast, began with nothing more than a wedding date.

The motive behind the killing is still unknown. Paster has no answers as to who shot her grandfather or why. Relatives have offered possible explanations, like one cousin’s version that centered on broken jailhouse promises.

Other theories posited by the family and reported by Paster include a turf fight over slot machines or a romance with a Chicago capo’s wife. Paster wrote that she could not determine whether any of them hold up.

Old family histories can resurface in unexpected ways. One couple who bought a Victorian home received a letter about its hidden history from the last surviving member of the family that once lived there.