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Mark Hortman was married to one of the most powerful politicians in Minnesota. But to the people who knew him well, he was just Mark, their incredibly positive, kind friend who loved mountain biking, fine whiskeys, music, his family and playing pool.
Curious and adventuresome, the North Carolina native gave off an easy vibe — unless you took a swipe at his spouse. In 2017, when Melissa took grief for criticizing white male lawmakers at the Capitol for playing cards off the House floor while women of color in her caucus spoke, Mark went online to push back against the trolls.
“As a white, card-playing male, husband of Melissa,” he responded to one critic, “I have to call bulls--- on you.”
Mostly, though, he was content to stay out of the limelight, except for the times he had to skip his weekly pool playing nights for political events to be his wife’s “arm candy.”
Mark Hortman, 58, died early Saturday when a gunman shot his way into the Hortmans’ home killing him and Melissa Hortman — the Minnesota House DFL leader and former House speaker — in what authorities say was a politically motivated assassination.
As they struggle now through their own pain, those who knew Mark well from his childhood to his tech career to his time around the pool table describe him as someone who easily made friends and kept them close, and who centered his life on Melissa and the kids.
“You ask how Mark’s doing. The response is always, ‘Terrific!’ or ‘Great!’ or ‘Things are going awesome!’” said Ross Bennett, a longtime friend and neighbor who shot pool with Mark on Monday nights at CR’s Sports Bar in Coon Rapids.
“You might think, can anybody really be that positive all the time?” Bennett said. “Mark is exactly who he appears to be.”
‘100 percent geeky’
Growing up in Raleigh, N.C., Mark Hortman learned lessons in humanity at a young age. In junior high, his father remarried, and three siblings became seven.
“I ended up with an immediate friends’ group because of him,” said Kirah Van Sickle, who was in the same grade as Mark and became his new stepsister. The two often played tennis together or shot pool at their family table.
His blended family went to concerts together and cheered on North Carolina State University basketball, especially when The Wolfpack won the men’s national title when Mark was a high school junior.
At Millbrook High School in Raleigh, his interests and talents were diverse — a theme that continued throughout his life. Gary Cram, a friend from Millbrook, remembered young Mark as “super fun-loving, very easygoing. Always one to crack a joke.”
He was athletic, but didn’t play for any high school teams. Instead, Mark acted and built sets with Millbrook’s drama program, the Masquers, which supported plays, or variety shows where student bands could play.
He had his own eclectic taste in music. In the era of ‘80s heavyweights Foreigner and REO Speedwagon, Mark introduced Cram to a “semi-obscure” band called Zebra. He saw them open for Canadian super band Loverboy once and argued it was Loverboy that was lacking, Cram recalled.
Mark Peters first met Mark in seventh grade. He described the Hortman house as a place where friends often gathered to play pool, watch videos of comedians or play Trivial Pursuit.
“He was a member of the drama club in high school, but his friend group was well beyond that,” Peters said. Hortman “never met a stranger.”
“He was funny, he was kind, he was 100 percent geeky as a physics major, right? But he was friendly and you could trust him,” Peters said. “He was the kind of person you would meet, and he would just pepper you with questions to get to know you, and he was one of the most inquisitive people that I know.”
Peters said he also had an “uncanny ability to find good people.”
After two years at NC State, Hortman jumped to the University of North Carolina. After graduation, he moved to Washington, D.C., and signed up to mentor a child from the inner city. That’s where he met Melissa for the first time — they had been assigned to mentor the same child. They were engaged three months after they met, said Harry Haluptzok, his father-in-law.
Van Sickle said she met Melissa for the first time at a bar in Raleigh. “I just remember thinking ‘Oh my gosh, he’s met his match.’ She was confident and she was funny and it was just obvious they were in love with each other.”
‘Show up and look pretty’
Mark Hortman’s life in Minnesota revolved around his family — Melissa and their kids, Colin and Sophie. He loved bragging about his kids and talking up the “fantastic job” Melissa was doing in politics.
At the last Minnesota Twins game they attended together, Bennett said Hortman shared that his daughter, who’d become a teacher, had put a lot of work into incorporating critical thinking skills into her curriculum for her students. “Mark was really proud of her for that.”
The kids were always a priority in the Hortman house. Mark mountain biked with his son and they shared a love of cooking.
The parents also made every major decision with their kids in mind.
Anything consequential that came up in their jobs got viewed through a family lens, Van Sickle said. “It was always, ‘Well what does this mean for our family? What will this mean to our kids?’”
The geeky high school kid grew into a tech-savvy code writer and problem solver for colleagues at Digital River, the e-commerce and technology firm where he once worked as a program manager.
“He always knew the quick shortcuts to formulas in a spreadsheet or, oh my gosh, pivot tables,” said Kim Silvernagel, who worked closely with Hortman at Digital River. “He was just a whiz with that kind of stuff and always willing to help out if you got hung up on something.”
His coworkers also described Hortman as someone who was authentic and passionate. He cared deeply about his interests, which ranged from home brewing to fostering service dogs and all things tech.
Hortman was someone he felt comfortable going to for advice “as a mentor, as a fellow father, as a guy,” said Brian Walsh, another Digital River colleague. “I knew I was going to get someone sharing a perspective that was calm and collected and even if he didn’t know the answer, he would listen.”
He liked to bring tres leches cake to company potlucks, Silvernagel said.
Hortman also brought a chocolate lab named Minnie to work as part of her service dog training, after clearing it with his workplace. Minnie became so beloved around the office that they celebrated her graduation from service dog training with a slide in a company presentation.
After work, it was playing pool that got him going. And he was pretty good.
Hortman played pool with multiple leagues around the Twin Cities, but often on Monday nights he was racking balls at CR’s in Coon Rapids. This year he was co-captain of the team.
Bennett said the pool tournaments at CR’s are some of the most competitive in the state. Mark, a mid-level player, “was never afraid to play against anybody,” Bennett said. Hortman often went up against higher skilled players and won. “We always called Mark our giant-killer.”
Sam Howell, Hortman's pool coach, said Hortman tried to make as many pool tournaments as he could, but he traveled often with Melissa for political events. Howell said he’d turn down invitations with tongue-in-cheek messages along the lines of, “‘I’ve got arm candy duty that weekend. I can’t do it. I got to show up and look pretty.’”
Melissa “was obviously the one in the limelight all the time and he was perfectly happy with that,” Bennett said.
On Monday, CR’s Sports Bar had a moment of silence for Hortman. Bar owner Jerry Johnson walked around with a bucket to raise money for the family. Howell said they raised a couple thousand dollars in a few minutes in a place that isn’t “the country club.”
After the killings, Howell said he was fielding messages of disbelief from the pool playing community, saying things like “surely that wouldn’t be the same Mark that we played pool with?” He had to confirm that yes, Mark from CR’s was Mark Hortman from the headlines.
‘Like a second set of parents’
Mark Hortman may not have embraced politics, but his wife’s DFL political recruits embraced Mark. He grew easily into his role of the supportive and proud spouse of an influential politician.
Mark “was just the one that you kind of went to when you didn’t want to chat about politics at some of these things,” said Rep. Erin Koegel, DFL-Spring Lake Park. “So it was just little things like that that made you feel a little bit more comfortable in these kind of awkward political situations that you're thrown into as a candidate.”
Like many Democratic representatives, Melissa Hortman was key in getting Koegel and other young DFLers to run for office and they could count on Mark’s support.
“The person behind the person doesn’t get enough credit,” Koegel said. “Because if they weren’t there, we’d be hot messes, that’s for sure, more than we are. So just the fact that he let her shine, I think really speaks a lot to the person he was.”
Rep. Brad Tabke, DFL-Shakopee, described Mark as a tinkerer always looking for a way to help Melissa. Before cell phones and iPads, Mark set up a database on a Palm Pilot that Melissa used to keep current on which homes she visited in the district and who she’d talked to.
In the last months of his life, he’d been working on a robot that would help with yard upkeep for Melissa, who was an avid gardener.
“Mark was building a robot for her, which Melissa absolutely did not want. But Mark was building the robot, and it was a robot to pull dandelions in their yard. And so that was the dandelion-pulling robot,” Tabke said.
Rep. Dan Wolgamott, DFL-St. Cloud, ran twice for the House, and lost both times. He was feeling pretty dejected and ready to throw in the towel when Melissa Hortman reached out.
“I’ll never forget, I got a call on April 14 of 2017 from Melissa, and she asked if I would be willing to give it one more try,” he said. “I told her that I’ve already run twice and I’ve lost. And she said, ‘Hey, I did the same thing. It also took me three times to run to win,’ and she let me know, ‘Hey, if you give it one more try, I’ve got your back.’”
Wolgamott won the race, and the Hortmans became a key part of his life.
A lawmaker from greater Minnesota, he didn’t have family in the Twin Cities “so Mark and Melissa kind of became my Twin Cities family,” watching football games, hanging out and going on Target runs.
“They really took me in and became like a second set of parents to me,” Wolgamott said.
When he went through a divorce in 2021, Mark and Melissa helped him through a very difficult time.
“Mark was just such a wonderful guy and we always kind of joked — Melissa loved her dog, Gilbert, her golden retriever that she got, and all she would do was talk, talk, talk about Gilbert, Gilbert, Gilbert,” Wolgamott said. “But the funny thing, if you took a golden retriever and turned it into a human, it would be Mark.”
“Mark just always had Melissa’s back,” he added. “Politics wasn’t his number one passion in life, but he just — he really loved his wife, and he supported her every way that he could.”
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