The fiance of Justine Damond, the woman killed by a Minneapolis police officer, is haunted by their last conversation.
On the night of 15 July, she called to tell him she heard what sounded like a rape happening in the alleyway behind their home.
“I have played this over in my head over and over,” Don Damond told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “Why didn’t I stay on the phone with her?”
He told her to call 911 and they talked until she said police arrived, when he told her “Stay put, call me back”, according to the Tribune.
Justine would never call back. When a Minneapolis squad car with officers Matthew Harrity and Mohamed Noor drove southward down the alleyway with its lights turned off, she went out to greet them. According to the testimony Harrity provided investigators, he was in the driver’s seat and was startled by a loud noise in the moment before Damond approached the car.
Noor, who was in the passenger seat, fired his gun, aiming across his partner and through the open window, according to documents released by investigators. Damond was hit once in the abdomen. Officers performed CPR for about 10 minutes before pronouncing her dead at the scene.
Damond’s death has provoked outrage in the US and Australia, where the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, called it “shocking and “inexplicable. On Friday, Minneapolis police chief Janeé Harteau resigned at the request of the mayor, Betsy Hodges, who said the chief had “lost the confidence of the people” in the aftermath of the shooting.
Hodges’s press conference to announce the move was then interrupted by protesters demanding more changes to the police department, which has been under scrutiny since the killing of Jamar Clark in 2015.
The police killing of another unarmed black man, Philando Castile, last year in nearby Falcon Heights has also also increased police community tensions the area. The officer who shot Castile, Jeronimo Yanez, was acquitted on 16 June, sparking protests that happened almost almost exactly a month before Damond’s death on 15 July.
According to the Tribune, Justine and Damond met a meditation retreat in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2012. Both were interested in the teachings of Joe Dispenza, a chiropractor whose work focuses on using lessons from neuroscience to improve people’s lives – an idea that Justine Damond would later explore in her meditation classes. Upon returning, Dom told a friend, “Hey, I just met my future wife ... The only problem is, she lives 9,000 miles away”, according to the Star Tribune.
The two kept in touch via Facebook, eventually meeting in Maui, Australia and San Francisco, where he proposed, according to the paper. Justine moved to Minneapolis in 2015.
“She had her family there [in Australia],” Damond told the Tribune. “All her friends, lifelong relationships, and she moved here for one person.”
Justine was reluctant to leave her home country, and hoped to eventually return to Sydney. According to the report, she told her godmother, Sara Baldwin, why.
“She didn’t like the guns [in the United States],” Baldwin said, according the paper. “She didn’t like the violence.”
