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Since it was shut down three years ago, the Bunge grain elevator has towered over southeast Minneapolis’s Como neighborhood with an almost gothic foreboding—a destination for taggers, vandals, urban adventurers, and young partyers who would explore the blighted relic of the agricultural industry, sending empty bottles of Rolling Rock crashing from its heights. It was a place eyed with annoyance and apprehension by many who live in the neighborhood’s modest homes and apartments.

Germain Vigeant (pronounced vy-jent) had always looked at the massive towers with curiosity. The twenty-year-old University of Minnesota student, who lived in a rented house three blocks away, loved the wild graffiti, the forbidden allure of broken windows and rusted pipes, and the prospect of telling stories after scaling the metal staircases to the top. As she stood near the towers at 3 a.m. on an unseasonably warm night last January, she looked once more at the white silos and wondered. She was flush from a night of partying with friends. She was standing next to a boy she liked—a boy who liked her. The boy knew the towers. He could get her to the top in no time, he said. And so the two of them walked toward them, slid open an unlatched door, and began to climb.

Fifteen minutes later, Germain lay dead at the bottom of one of the silos . . . .