MINNEAPOLIS _ In the nearly two years since Justine Ruszczyk Damond's death, authorities have failed to identify the source of the noise that led the Australian woman to call 911 before she was shot, an investigator with the Hennepin County Attorney's Office testified on Thursday afternoon.
"When I first learned of the case, there were some questions," said the investigator, Nancy Dunlap, who homed in on the sound of a woman screaming that aroused Damond's suspicions that a sexual assault was occurring behind her Minneapolis home. She felt it was important because "this person could be a witness to what happened," Dunlap said.
Damond, 40, was shot in her south Minneapolis alley by then-officer Mohamed Noor on July 15, 2017, after he and his partner responded to her 911 call. Noor is now standing trial for third-degree murder.
"Were the BCA (state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension) and the MPD (Minneapolis Police Department) looking for this woman?" asked prosecutor Patrick Lofton.
"No, they were not," Dunlap said.
The veteran investigator joined the county attorney's office from a 30-year career with Minneapolis police. During her time as an officer, she investigated at three separate officer-involved shootings.
Dunlap testified that she also went door-to-door to ask Damond's neighbors whether they had dogs, whose barking and whining might explain the noises that Damond heard.
In preparing the case, Dunlap testified that that she pored through hundreds of phone records, witness statements, scanner radio transmissions, surveillance videos and body-worn camera footage. She also reviewed all calls for service, both for the 5th Precinct and citywide, focusing on robberies, assaults and any calls "that could generate any type of noise."
Recognizing that sometimes victims of sexual assault don't report the crimes to police, Dunlap testified that she also checked in with officials at Hennepin County Medical Center about whether any recent cases fit that description. She was told that none did.
One of the calls that caught her attention was one involving a potentially mentally unstable woman who was spotted wandering around the area earlier that night. The episode was described in detail on Wednesday morning by a woman who lived in the neighborhood and who called police three times to report the other woman's erratic behavior.
The chronology shown to jurors showed that about 30 minutes after the last of those calls, Noor and Harrity "self-assigned themselves" to the call, while they were in the area of 48th and Xerxes avenues South, according to their squad vehicle's GPS system.
After driving through the area and asking dispatchers about the 911 caller's whereabouts, the officers declared the call "Code 4," meaning that they hadn't found the woman. After driving back to precinct headquarters for dinner, they went back on duty at 11:12 p.m., Dunlap testified. About 15 minutes later, Damond called 911 for the first time, to report that she had heard "sex sounds" and the voice of a woman apparently in distress in the alley behind her home.
Damond would call back about seven minutes and 40 seconds later, at 11:35 p.m., to check on the responding squads' status.
Two minutes after that, Noor indicated on his in-squad computer that the officers had arrived to the scene; their GPS system showed them driving through the alley about eight miles an hour, before declaring the scene "Code 4" before they reached the end of the alley.
Dunlap testified that based on her best guess, the fatal shot was fired in a 14-second interval between 11:40:15 and 11:40:29, when Harrity first turned on his body camera.
About 13 seconds after that, a teenage passerby began recording the scene on his cellphone.
Dunlap's investigation showed that Noor and Harrity responded to 12 separate calls for service that night _ including two related to the shooting _ during their shift, ranging from a call involving an "emotionally disturbed person" at a nearby senior living facility.
Noor, Dunlap testified, activated his body-worn camera on half of those calls, while Harrity never turned his recording device on, until after Damond was shot.
The two officers had worked in the same squad together at least 35 times since Harrity moved to the precinct in December 2016; Noor was assigned there in May of that year.
Earlier Wednesday, a teenage bicyclist who witnessed the immediate aftermath of Damond's shooting testified, while jurors watched a 29-second cellphone video he recorded of the scene.
The brief clip showed Noor leaning over Damond as Harrity tried to revive her.
"Ma'am, stay with me," Harrity is heard saying in the recording, before apparently instructing Noor to step away. Noor is then seen standing up and briefly pacing, before turning toward the teen, whom he apparently hadn't noticed standing there.
"You can videotape _ just back up," he told the teenager, according to the recording, which ended a few seconds later. It was the first time Noor's voice has been heard on a recording since the trial started.
The 17-year-old, who was 16 at the time, also testified that he had trouble remembering details about the incident, because he had tried his hardest to forget the episode.
Some of those inconsistencies surfaced at trial on Wednesday. Prosecutors previously raised doubts of his recollections.
Several days after the shooting, he told an interviewer at CornerHouse, a children's advocacy center, that he remembered seeing the two officers outside of their police SUV in the moments before the shooting, which runs counter to the long-running narrative that Noor shot Damond from inside the cruiser.
Attorneys for both sides singled out apparent discrepancies between his answers in that interview, and what he told prosecutors Amy Sweasy and Patrick Lofton when he met with them last month.
"Did you have a good memory of what happened," Lofton asked in court Wednesday.
"Not at all," the teen admitted.
When asked which version of his account was true, he testified that he believed it was the observations he made in the earlier CornerHouse interview.
He also alternated between telling investigators that the female victim was wearing jeans and a tank top, and later saying she had on a summer dress. Prosecutors said that Damond was in her pajamas and barefoot when she was shot.
"I'm gonna rip off the Band-Aid and ask you some awkward questions," Lofton said, before inquiring about whether he had smoked pot earlier that day.
He had, he admitted, and had also consumed some whiskey _ "not that much, it was definitely less than four shots."
He testified that on the night of the shooting, he had been riding back to his friend's house to drop off some marijuana belonging to the friend. Riding with a headphone in one ear, he put the other one in as soon as he spotted a police SUV "to ease my nerves."
He told the court that he remembered seeing two officers outside of their squad, and a woman in jeans and a tank top standing nearby, holding a phone to her ear with one hand, and with the other hand raised in the air.
How close was she to the vehicle? Lofton asked.
"Not very close, but not very far," he responded, saying it was between 7 and 10 feet.
The teen said that he ducked his head and turned away from the scene, when he heard a gunshot. The loud crackle startled him, he said, and he immediately stopped and began recording on his cellphone.
"I mean, it's the day and age of phones," he said in response to a prosecution question about why he recorded the incident. "It's a cop shooting _ gotta record it."
He described seeing one officer, apparently Harrity, rushing to the woman, while the other just "kind of walked to the driveway" and "paced around _ was kind of seeing if anyone was around."
When asked why kept a piece of paper with the mayor's and police chief's phone numbers on it, he testified that he thought he might need to call them someday.
"I saw a policeman shoot a woman, some serious business," he said.
After returning to his house later that night, the teenager said he sent the video to seven to 10 of his closest friends on Snapchat. After hearing about some of the details of the shooting, he said that he tried to push the incident from his mind. He wasn't contacted by state investigators until several days later, when "three all black vans" pulled up to him as he walked out of his home, he said. At first, he was leery.
"Me knowing what went down, I didn't immediately trust authoritative figures," he testified, adding that he later agreed to speak to authorities.
The footage later surfaced on Facebook, the defense said.
During his cross-examination, defense attorney Thomas Plunkett asked the teenager to explain the discrepancies in his accounts.
"I currently don't remember most of that situation _ I tried to get it out of my head as fast as possible after that interview," he said.
Earlier in the hearing, prosecutors brought to the stand the neighbor who had called police before Damond's shooting about the apparently disoriented woman who was wandering through the neighborhood.
The neighbor, Patricia McIlvenna, testified that after learning about the shooting, she was convinced that the woman she saw was the same one that Damond reportedly heard screaming in the alley behind her home.
Prosecutors called Brad Dugdale, who lives on the 5000 block of Washburn, to establish an independent time for the gunshot through his home surveillance video.
Dugdale and his partner were hosting a dinner and gathering for friends, which ran late into the night.
The video showed guests leaving and later, some squads driving down the street. Dugdale said a faint pop can be heard on the video, but it was not audible in the courtroom.
Guests Wyatt and Christina Yeater both testified that they were outside Dugdale's home around 11:40 p.m. about to leave when they heard a gun shot.
The husband and wife said they recognized it immediately as a gunshot. They drove by the scene on their way home.
Christina Yeater testified that she saw the squad and one officer performing lifesaving measures on a woman in pajamas.
"There was enough light that I could see her on the ground pretty clearly," she said.
Prosecutors have sought to prove through several witnesses that the scene was well lit and that people were easily identifiable. The defense has argued that Noor and Harrity were spooked by a noise and Damond's presence, causing Noor to shoot.
Before the jury was brought in on Wednesday morning, Plunkett told the court that Police Chief Medaria Arradondo had issued a departmentwide directive barring any officer from attending the proceedings. Plunkett argued that such a restriction could compromise his client's right to a fair and open trial, and asked presiding Judge Kathryn Quaintance to intervene.
Quaintance said the matter was out of her hands.
"I don't see that the court can tell the police chief how to run his organization," she said. "That seems like his authority over the people who work for him.
