On Nov. 9, 2008, Francis Van Asten videotaped a short road trip from his home to the Mall of America. The Bloomington resident, now 66, planned to send it to his fiancée’s family in Vietnam so they could see life in the United States. 

As he headed down an escalator, camera in hand, mall guards caught sight of him. 

“Right away, I noticed he had a video camera and was recording the rotunda area,” a security guard wrote in a suspicious activity report. “When he got to second floor [sic] he turned to the overlook of the park while still videotaping.”

Van Asten, a onetime missile system repairman for the Army, was questioned for approximately two hours, according to his suspicious activity report. He was asked about traveling to Vietnam and how he came to know people there. Van Asten was even asked through which mall door he entered.

The report later filed about him said he was “open and very willing to share information.”

Guards asked to see the contents of his camera. “The footage of all the vehicles and structures of the east ramp really worried me,” the security guard wrote. 

Authorities were concerned about footage of an airplane landing at Minnesota’s international airport. They also worried Van Asten was conducting surveillance of mall property. 

Van Asten said it was not clear to him at the time why he was stopped. After all, he was told nothing prohibited him from taking photographs or footage of the mall. But the mall’s guards still called Bloomington police, and they alerted the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. Van Asten was given a pat-down search, and the FBI demanded that his memory card be confiscated “for further analysis.”

Exhausted and rattled, Van Asten had trouble finding his car after the ordeal was over. 

“I sat down in my car and I cried, and I was shaking like a leaf,” Van Asten said in an interview at his home. “That kind of sensation doesn’t leave you real quickly when you’ve had an experience like that.”