On an early June morning in 2025, the Twin Cities woke up to two very different crises.
On one side of town, federal agents were gearing up for a major cartel‑related drug operation. Streets would be blocked, long guns visible, tensions high. By mid‑day, a separate search on Lake Street would draw crowds, cell phones, and rumors of an immigration raid, raising fears that the city could, once again, ignite.
On the other side of town, a decorated Department of Homeland Security task force officer sat alone in his car, two pistols within reach, his life collapsing around him.
And he called a lawyer.
Set up for a sting and an arrest
For Joe Thompson, then the acting United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota, this was one of the most demanding jobs in federal law enforcement and he was challenging situations.
The night before, Thompson’s office had learned that one of their own, a Homeland Security Investigations agent and task force officer named Scott (name changed for privacy), was under investigation for serious sexual‑abuse charges. Scott had a strong reputation. “People knew him. He was a good agent,” Thompson recalls. But the allegations were grave. And there was another urgent complication: Scott was scheduled to be out on the street that morning for this high‑risk search operation.
“We realized he was going to be out on the street for that big search operation,” Thompson says. “We didn’t want that to happen.” A plan was thrown together in the dark hours before dawn: lure Scott to the FBI with a ruse and arrest him there, in a controlled environment, before he joined the operation fully armed.
The plan did not go well.
Thompson says., “He drove to the FBI and somehow realized something was awry, figured out what was going on. And so he took off and went driving around on the lam, trying to figure out what to do.”
A 6:30 a.m. call from a man ready to die
Somewhere in that window between leaving the FBI and deciding his fate, Scott picked up the phone and called defense attorney Ryan Pacyga.
It was about 6:30 in the morning. Scott had already concluded that his life as he knew it was over. According to Ryan, he was actively suicidal. Federal charges were coming. His career in law enforcement was finished. Everything his identity was built on—service, trust, duty—had collapsed overnight. Ryan stayed on the phone with Tim, he wanted to keep Tim on the line and alive.
Scott drove to Ryan’s office. Ryan asked Scott if he was armed. Scott was armed with two guns. Ryan told Scott he wanted him to stay alive, and said he’d get in the car with Scott if Scott gave his guns to Ryan, because Ryan was worried that Scott would harm himself. Scott let Ryan take the guns. Ryan locked him in his car, and then got in the car with Scott so that he could be with him when he surrendered himself.
“Ryan called me that morning in the car with Scott,” Thompson remembers. “I asked, ‘Is he armed?’ And Ryan said he was, but he gave me the guns and they are no longer in his possession.”
Thompson, hearing that the guns were out of Scott’s hands, moved to arrange a safe surrender.
“I talked to the FBI to arrange for his self‑surrender at the federal courthouse in Minneapolis to the marshals,” he says. The plan was straightforward: Ryan would ride with Gregg from his office in Eagan to downtown Minneapolis, and Scott would walk into custody alive.
For a moment, it looked like that might be the end of it.
The third gun
As they drove toward downtown with Scott behind the wheel, everything changed again.
“When they got close,” Thompson recalls. “Scott just said he couldn’t. He kind of panicked.”
Then came the detail that made everyone sit up straighter. Ryan learned of a third gun in Scott’s possession. Thomspson recalls, “I remember telling Ryan to get out of the car and he’s like, ‘I can’t.’ Which is scary.”
“Frankly, there’s no one I’d rather want in that position than Ryan,” Thompson says now. “His demeanor and calm and obvious empathy for his clients really came through.”
Not just a lawyer
Through hours of back‑and‑forth phone calls, Ryan worked to hold Scott in that fragile space between despair and surrender.
“It was extraordinary what he did for his client,” Thompson says. “He was serving as a counselor, not just a lawyer.”
Thompson is careful in how he talks about most cases. But here he doesn’t mince words:
“That day could have played out a hundred times,” he says. “Scott doesn’t survive the day all too many of those times.”
Ryan’s message to Scott was simple and relentless: I’m going to be your lawyer. I’m going to see you through this. Don’t compound an already terrible situation by making an irreversible decision today. You’ve got people that love you and they want you to live through this.
At the same time, Thompson stepped briefly into the conversation himself. “I remember saying, ‘I don’t know you, Scott, but I’ve heard about your service,’” Thompson recalls. “We recognize that. Don’t throw all that away today by making a terrible decision. Come in. We’re going to figure this out. You have a great lawyer. Listen to him.”
Scott listened. He finally surrendered.
A system, not a blood sport
When cases like this make the news, it’s easy to see only the headlines: a federal agent charged with horrific crimes, a guilty plea, a prison sentence.
From the inside, that day told a different story about the justice system, and about the role of a defense lawyer within it. “I think sometimes people misjudge the criminal justice system,” Thompson says. “It’s adversarial, yes, at its core in some ways, but in other ways, it’s a system and we are all working toward the same outcome – justice.”
In most cases, he explains, “someone has made a mistake that’s criminal, there’s plenty of evidence, it ought to be charged, and they’re going to be convicted. The question is, how do you get through this?”
On that day, the shared goal between prosecutor and defense was not to crush Scott or exact revenge.
“The goal wasn’t, ‘He committed a terrible crime, if he dies, he dies,’” Thompson says. “The goal was to get him into custody safely so we could start the criminal‑justice process.” From there, the system would do what it was designed to do: charge, plead or try, and ultimately punish. But that system only matters if the person at the center of it is still alive.
Humanity in the aftermath
The charges against Scott were serious and deeply harmful. In MPR’s account of the case, Scott ultimately pled guilty in federal court to a reduced charge and was sentenced to prison.
None of that is erased by what happened in that car.
What did change, according to Thompson, was how everyone involved saw Scott—as a whole human being, not just a case file.
“You see the humanity in it,” Thompson says. “It was an interesting case because Scott had worked with a lot of people in the office, and people knew him. What happened was terrible. But you see the humanity, and… this whole day and Ryan’s representation of him afterward really brought that out.”
In a corner of the federal system where crimes involve children and trauma, that’s not a small thing.
“Sometimes prosecutors can lose sight of the humanity of who they prosecute,” Thompson says, especially in certain types of cases. “It can be easy to forget that these are real people that made a mistake—maybe it’s a terrible mistake—but still, they’re people with feelings and humanity at their core.”
Scott’s mental state that day, the way he surrendered, and the presence of a lawyer who refused to abandon him all became part of that picture.
“He wouldn’t have made it”
Thompson is confident when asked what would have happened if Ryan had walked away from that car.
“He wouldn’t have made it,” Thompson says quietly. “He probably would have taken his own life.”
Instead, Scott lived to face the consequences. He pled guilty. He was sentenced. He went to prison. And before he left, he did something that meant more to Ryan than any fee ever could: he handed his lawyer a challenge coin, which is an honor often reserved in military and law‑enforcement circles for service that goes far beyond the call of duty.
“Well beyond above and beyond”
When you’ve spent a career as a prosecutor, you see hundreds of defense attorneys at work. Many are capable. Many are smart. Some are excellent advocates.
Very few climb into a car with a suicidal, armed client and stay there when they’re told to get out.
“A lot of attorneys would have said, ‘Forget it, just arrest him, do what you gotta do, I don’t want anything to do with this,’” Thompson says. “Ryan had every opportunity. Some people would say he probably should have.”
“But he didn’t,” Thompson says. “He was there till the very end, when he had every opportunity to say, ‘Whatever happens to you, you’re on your own.’”
“To say he went above and beyond doesn’t even begin to describe it,” Thompson adds. “That makes it sound like he worked late at night. It was well beyond that.”
For Thompson, it cemented something he already suspected about Pacyga.
“He’s a really great lawyer,” Thompson says. “But he’s an extraordinary person. He’s someone who’s full of empathy. If I had a person in my own life who needed representation in a crisis, he’s someone I’d want there.”
What this story is—and isn’t
Nothing about this story minimizes the harm of Scott’s crimes or the pain of his victim. The federal case moved forward. Scott accepted responsibility and received a significant prison sentence.
What this story does is pull back the curtain on a different kind of moment in criminal defense practice: the hours before the headlines, when a person’s life hangs in the balance and a lawyer has to decide what kind of human being they’re going to be.
On that June day, while the city worried about protests on Lake Street and the news cycle was focused on the big story playing out across town, a defense attorney chose to stay in a car he’d been told to get out of. He took guns out of his client’s hands. He rode with him through panic. He talked him into a courthouse instead of a grave.
And according to the man who led the prosecution that day, there’s a simple bottom line:
“There’s no one I’d rather want in that position than Ryan Pacyga.”