When Minneapolis police officers Matthew Harrity and Mohamed Noor arrived at the alleyway behind the home of Justine Damond on the night of 15 July, they radioed in a “code four”, which means “no assistance needed” or “situation is under control”.
The time was 11.39pm. The sequence of events that followed would reverberate around the world and, within days, devastate a family, upend a city’s politics and transfix two nations.
The police shooting of Damond, also known as Ruszczyk, would reinforce widely held international views of the US as a country where gun culture and trigger-happy police are out of control. Locally, it would also give a renewed sense of urgency to black activists who, for the past two years, had been marching, blocking highways and holding occupations as part of a campaign to bring an end to police shootings in their communities.
As they would quickly realise, this case wouldn’t follow the patterns they had grown used to seeing. Some would say that was because authorities had learned from past mistakes, while others would say it was because of who the victim was, and who she was not. The details of what happened when the two officers drove through that alleyway has slowly come into focus over the past week, but there is still much that is not known.
The alleyway
The officers were driving south down the alleyway in the quiet residential neighbourhood of Fulton, south Minneapolis. Damond, a 40-year-old woman from Sydney, lived there with her fiance Dom, who she met at a meditation retreat in Colorado in 2012. Fulton is not the kind of neighbourhood where alleyways, even the darkened kind, are necessarily dangerous places. One popular site considers it to be the third safest neighbourhood in Minneapolis. In the adjacent Linden Hills neighbourhood, where Damond taught meditation at a spiritual centre, one of the more pressing social problems is a debate over mini-McMansions and backyard sightlines. Violent crime is virtually nonexistent.
On that night, Damond heard what she thought was the sound of a sexual assault happening behind her home. She thought she heard a woman who needed help.
First, she called Dom, who told her to “stay put” and call 911.
“It’s been going on for awhile and I think she tried to say help and it sounded distressed,” she told the 911 operator. When police didn’t arrive right away, she called again.
It is unclear exactly why Damond left her house. Some reports have said investigators think she was trying to get the attention of officers to direct them to the right location, since they had driven too far along the alleyway. But we do know, from a search warrant, that investigators believe she slapped the back of the police SUV as she approached it, and that the driver, Harrity, said he was startled by a loud noise. It was Noor, in the passenger seat, who pulled the trigger, shooting across his partner and through the window, striking Damond in the abdomen.
The 911 transcript shows that at 11.42pm, officers began performing CPR. At some point, a witness on a bike reportedly filmed a video.
What the witness saw has not been revealed but he has spoken to investigators.
At 11.51pm, officers pronounced Damond dead at the scene.
A video, a vigil and a march
The next day, at about 8.30am, Bethany Bradley, a 35-year-old mother of three, was on her way to a meeting when she noticed a police investigation van by the corner of Washburn and 50th, near where Damond had been shot.
Bradley was a co-founder of Women’s March Minnesota, the local chapter of the movement behind the march that saw more than an estimated 5 million people protest worldwide the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Through that work, she’d attended Black Lives Matter protests, and got to know some of the activists working on police reform issues in the Twin Cities – Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
She knew the van could mean trouble – it had the words “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension” on the side, and the BCA is the agency that investigates police shootings. She texted Jason Sole, the president of the Minneapolis NAACP, a civil rights group that had been collaborating with Women’s March.
All they knew, he told her, was that police had shot a white woman, who had died. Bradley asked him what she could do to help. “This is your actual neighbourhood. You live there. And I think you should go and see what you can do to help,” she recalled him saying.
At that point, a trickle of activists and journalists began to arrive at the scene. On this issue, the mood in the city was already tense following two years of continuous protests after the police killings of unarmed black men, Jamar Clark in 2015 and Philando Castile in 2016. The officer who shot Castile had been acquitted almost exactly a month before Damond’s death, sparking mass protests that shut down a local highway.
In those past protests, Bradley saw it as her role to support the black activists. Now, suddenly, the script was flipped. Sole told her to text or call once she arrived.
Sole explained later: “When we are protesting and rising up against injustice, we want people to support us and help us out but we don’t want them to take the lead. I didn’t feel it was appropriate at the Minneapolis NAACP to try and take the lead on this.” He added that the Women’s March seemed like a “good fit” since some of its core organisers, like Bradley, were from the area.
As Bradley came to talk to neighbours milling about the scene, a young man approached her and asked: “Do you know what happened here?” She told him she didn’t yet, and asked what he knew, and he replied: “All I know is that was my mom and the police killed her.”
It was Zach Damond, Justine’s 22-year-old stepson.
“No one will give us any answers. No will give us any information,” Bradley remembered him saying.
Bradley said she thought of her own children in that moment. She also thought of the video that Diamond Reynolds, the girlfriend of Philando Castile, had filmed in the moments after he was shot, and how she had done it while her daughter was in the backseat of the car.
Like Reynolds had done, Bradley started a Facebook livestream, capturing the video of Zach Damond demanding answers. It would be seen by millions of people across the world in the days to come.
“My mom is dead because a police officer shot her for reasons I don’t know and I demand answers,” he says.
Bradley’s hands were shaking as she filmed. It had never occurred to her that something like this could happen in her neighbourhood, but she knew what she wanted to do. “I knew in that moment that the best way to push to find answers … was to get that story live on to the internet.”
The Women’s March page already had thousands of followers, and the video, raw and emotional, quickly spread. Within minutes, more people started arriving on the scene. Bradley and a group of black community activists organised a vigil for that evening, creating a Facebook page and printing out a flyer. Angela Jimenez, a photographer who was there, told the Guardian there was a noticeable juxtaposition of neighbours who were shocked and in a “raw, emotional, place”, and the veteran activists who had come to support them. People took turns speaking in front of the alleyway where Damond died, and the street quickly filled with messages left in chalk. One read: “Justine should be alive.”
A trend had been set. From the start, the activists working on Damond’s case had been a diverse coalition, with experienced black activists helping to support people from the neighbourhood like Bradley.
Later that week, hundreds of people marched through south Minneapolis in a show of support for Justine Damond. The makeup of the coalition was now evident, as was the connection to the Castile case – Bradley was present when Valerie Castile, Philando’s mother, met Dom Damond. The protesters walked past Justine Damond’s house, marching in silence to respect the family’s desire to honour the yoga teacher’s peaceful nature. The rally that followed was filled with impassioned speeches by black leaders such as Nekima Levy-Pounds, a civil rights attorney and mayoral candidate, Leslie Redmond, of the Minneapolis NAACP and Jonathan Thompson, a friend of Castile’s, whose rousing speeches have become a fixture at protests over the past year.
There were many in the crowd that day who were attending their first protest. Bradley ran into one – a woman who lived in her neighbourhood.
“She told me: ‘I’m not used to this. Chants aren’t something I’ve done before. I’m not used to yelling as I walk,’”Bradley recalled. “And I said: ‘You know, there was a time I wasn’t used to it either, and now, I am totally there.’”
Freshwater Beach
It wasn’t just local activists paying attention to Justine Damond’s case. Two days after the vigil in south Minneapolis, another took place, but this one was at a beach.
On the morning of 19 July, Justine Damond’s friends and family, including her parents John and Maryan Ruszczyk, gathered before dawn at Freshwater Beach in Sydney, not far from where she grew up. They walked down the sand with lit candles, and held a silent group meditation with yoga mats on the ground. As the sun rose, a didgeridoo played.
John Ruszczyk spoke to reporters afterwards. “Justine was a beacon to all of us. We only ask that the light of justice shine down on the circumstance of her death,” he said.
#TheWorldIsWatching
Justine Damond’s death helped draw more upper-middle-class white residents into street protests. And what was happening in Minneapolis, in terms of the case uniting a broad spectrum of people, was also true nationally, as Shaun King, a well-established writer and researcher on police brutality, noted in a recent New York Daily News column: “The preponderance of conservatives and liberals alike all agree that the shooting of Justine Damond was wrong. That’s rarely happened before.”
But as King goes on to explain, the unusually widespread agreement could not be explained by just the details of the case, because there was a long list of unarmed black people being shot by police under clear-cut circumstances of innocence. King’s suggestion, that the fact Damond was a white woman was part of why many people saw the case differently, is a widely held belief.
I'm seeing a swiftness of justice for #JustineDamond that I simply have never seen before for a single Black victim of police brutality. https://t.co/GXWXlSeJCy
— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) July 25, 2017
Black Lives Matter organiser Miski Noor dug deeper into the “vicious double standard” many see in the Damond case in a piece for the website Color Lines:
The narrative surrounding Ruszczyk, who was fatally shot by Officer Mohamed Noor, is humanizing. She was automatically afforded this grace because she was a white woman killed by state-sanctioned violence. That portrayal is elusive to Black, Latinx, Indigenous and other marginalised people victimised by law enforcement again and again. When police kill us, their versions of the story are automatically accepted as truth by our elected officials and by media who reflexively dig for victims’ criminal records. For us, the burden of proof is on our communities.
There was also another factor at play as to why Damond’s case proceeded as it did, one going back to that beach in Sydney: she had her family behind her, and her family had the Australian government and the Australian press, behind it.
When Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull called the shooting “inexplicable” and “shocking” it drew international headlines but, on the ground, it was the presence of Australian reporters that had the most obvious impact. The Australians took a more aggressive tone than their American peers, hammering away at the mayor as to why the police chief was absent in the days after Damond’s death, for instance, and continually raising the issue of gun violence and police culture while local reporters were more focused on incremental developments.
Their presence was felt. At the march in south Minneapolis, a popular sign among the protesters was an image made by local artist Leon Wang with “Justice for Justine” written below a dandelion, with its seeds blowing in the wind. Next to it was the hashtag #TheWorldIsWatching.
“For me, what it felt like was beyond just our typical media coverage, this was an international thing. Australia is watching,” Bradley sad. “Sometimes we can become numb to all these stories we hear here in the US, but I think their desire to push it more is because it’s something that is not as common as where they come from.”
Levy-Pounds agreed, writing in a text message that the Australian government and media had “applied intense pressure and scrutiny” to the mayor, Betsy Hodges, and the police department, “unlike what they had ever experienced before”.
Regardless of the driving factor – broadness of the local coalition, the whiteness and class of the victim or the international pressure, or in all likelihood, some combination of all those factors – the speed at which authorities moved in the Damond case had not been predicted.
Within five days of the shooting, the mayor of Minneapolis asked for the resignation of police chief Janeé Harteau, declaring she had “lost the confidence of the people”, the first time in the post-Ferguson era that a police chief had been made to resign over a police killing.
Scratching my head tryin to remember all those times a Police Chief quit after a black person was killed by policehttps://t.co/lpxbw95lHh
— Stu with a You (@StuRap) July 22, 2017
Four days later, on Wednesday, police announced changes to their body camera policy to ensure they would always be turned on when officers responded to calls, which didn’t happen in Damond’s case.
The investigation into Damond’s killing has only just begun, and – to the intense frustration of parts of the media, and the mayor – we have yet to hear from the man who pulled the trigger, Officer Noor. But police reform is now dominating the debate in the Minneapolis mayoral election, with one prominent progressive candidate calling for the disarming of the Minneapolis Police Department.
Damond’s family has asked that her body be repatriated to Sydney so it can “farewell her in her home town among family and friends”. Back at the alleyway, where Damond approached that police SUV, most of the memorial set up during the vigil has been moved to the spiritual center where she taught, but there are still bouquets of flowers and plastic star necklaces hanging from a branch of a nearby bush and half-burnt candles on the sidewalk. Three cardboard signs are still prominent, all with the same simple question: why?
