When police pulled over a vehicle in St. Paul several months ago, officers found loaded guns under the driver’s and passenger’s seats. They arrested two men who were in the car and are barred from having firearms.

On Friday, U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Erica MacDonald announced a federal indictment charging each with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.

“This case is part of our St. Paul violence initiative that’s going to bring the full force of federal laws to try to address the violence we’re seeing in the city of St. Paul,” MacDonald said Friday.

There have been 153 people shot — 26 of them fatally — in St. Paul this year, compared with 135 as of mid-November last year. Half of the city’s homicides happened since the beginning of September.

The investigation was conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the St. Paul Police Department, after officers responded to a report that people inside a car were passing around a bag, which the caller believed contained drugs, according to an ATF special agent’s affidavit filed in federal court in October.

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Police were called to the parking lot of the Holiday gas station on Old Hudson Road and White Bear Avenue about 4 a.m. on Aug. 11.

Kevin Kareem White, 36, of St. Paul, who was in the back passenger seat, had a warrant for driving after cancellation of license. Police were arresting him and found a bag of suspected marijuana in his pants pocket, the affidavit said.

Police then asked Derwin Idell Moore, 33, of St. Paul, who was driving, and a woman in the front passenger seat to exit the car. As police searched the car for drugs, “officers immediately noticed that a flap of fabric on the front driver’s seat was loose and out of place,” according to the affidavit.

Officers looked under the cushion and found a 9 mm pistol loaded with an 18-round magazine and a bullet in the chamber.

Another pistol was under the cushion of the front passenger seat, along with a digital scale. That gun was reported stolen from Cottage Grove two days earlier.

White and Moore declined to speak to officers. The woman in the car said she met Moore at a bar that night and neither men mentioned anything about firearms being in the vehicle.

DNA testing, which was completed in October, linked Moore to the gun under the driver’s seat and White to the firearm under the passenger’s seat, according to the affidavit.

Moore’s attorney, Tom Plunkett, said Friday: “Enforcement that focuses on one segment of the community is dangerous. Incarcerated for minding your own business, that’s not fair. I look forward to getting my case into court and defending my client.”

Moore and White aren’t allowed to possess guns because of previous felony convictions.

Moore was convicted nine times between 2004 and 2018 for robbery, drug possession and sale, and bail jumping in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois, the affidavit said. White was convicted of fifth-degree drug possession in Ramsey County in 2012.