David Brom, then a 16-year-old high school sophomore, took an ax in the middle of the night and killed his parents, his 13-year-old sister and 11-year-old brother. The acts took more than 60 blows from an ax, officials said. Olmsted County Sheriff’s deputies discovered the bodies of the four Brom family members on Feb. 18, 1988, in the family's Cascade Township home, just north of Rochester's city limits at the time. Deputies went there after Lourdes High School administrators called the sheriff’s office regarding rumors circulating in the school where Brom was a student. Deputies found the four family members had been dead for hours and immediately began an investigation and search for Brom. He was taken into custody the next day after he was spotted at a Rochester post office.
As Brom headed to trial in 1989, it appeared he might have had a chance for freedom much sooner. In the lead-up to Brom’s trial, on April 22, 1989, Judge Gerald Ring decided to try Brom in the juvenile system. That meant Brom would have been released from prison before his 19th birthday in October 1990. The decision to try Brom as a juvenile sparked public outrage and was reversed by the state appeals court and the reversal was upheld later by the state Supreme Court.
Brom was convicted of the murders on Oct. 16, 1989, and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences. At the time of his conviction, Minnesota law required anyone convicted of a life sentence to serve a minimum term of 17 years in confinement for each life sentence. He has been at Lino Lakes Correctional Facility since. Initially, Brom would have been in his 70s before being eligible for parole. However, a 2023 Minnesota law gives offenders convicted as juveniles a chance for review. The new law allows for parole or supervised release review for offenders who have served 15 or more years of a sentence after being convicted of crimes committed as juveniles.
As a deputy with the Olmsted County Sheriff’s office in 1988, Kevin Torgerson, now Olmsted County Sheriff, was one of the first law enforcement officers on the scene of the murders. He responded to a call from Lourdes High School officials about a rumor on Feb. 18, 1988, that Brom had hurt and possibly killed his father. Torgerson discovered the bodies of all four family members in the upstairs of the Brom home on the north outskirts of Rochester.
“It is still hard for me to accept and forget the sights and smells of what I saw that Thursday evening in 1988,” Sheriff Kevin Torgerson wrote in a statement Wednesday, July 16, 2025, responding to the SRB’s decision to begin Brom’s transition to parole. Sheriff Torgerson said he was asked in December, prior to the hearing, to provide written input about the decision to release Brom and that he spoke with one of the Department of Corrections commission members. In that written statement to the board that Torgerson later echoed in the public statement he made Wednesday, Torgerson said Brom has twice benefited from leniency. The first time was when his sentence for killing his youngest sister, Diane, was made concurrent with his sentence for killing his younger brother, Ricky. “With the vicious severity and the needless nature of the killings of his little brother and sister it seemed he should have been expected to serve full sentences for both,” Torgerson said.
Under Minnesota guidelines put in place in 2023, Brom is now eligible for monitored release. This month, Brom will be moved to a Twin Cities halfway house where he will remain in state custody and be monitored. A case manager will supervise his release. It will include GPS monitoring, according to Aaron Swanum, Minnesota Department of Corrections media information officer. Brom’s release date is listed as July 29 on the state DOC website. In most cases, people who are released from prison return to the county of their conviction. The DOC Release Board decided at Brom’s most recent release hearing that Brom would not be released to Olmsted County for work release or any other future parole release. Despite a highly publicized trial and decades of speculation, what motivated Brom to take an ax and kill his family members at their home in the early hours of Feb. 18, 1988, remains a public mystery.
