Efforts to Reopen a Fatal Shooting by Minneapolis Police Just Hit a Roadblock, But a Prosecutor Says He Won’t Give Up

The prosecutor who initially validated the Minneapolis Police Department’s account of the fatal shooting of Terrance Franklin, an unarmed Black man killed by SWAT officers, is now looking at ways to revive the 8-year-old case after a state agency refused to investigate it.

“I am determined not to let this review die,” Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman told TIME on July 28, two days after the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) served notice that it was declining the prosecutor’s request to probe the case with an eye toward prosecuting the officers.

It’s the latest twist in the May 2013 killing that Franklin’s family has called an execution, but that police have maintained was a justified use of force after Franklin, 22, allegedly grabbed an officer’s gun and opened fire. TIME in June published a lengthy examination of the case, focusing on a bystander’s video that captured sounds from the basement where Franklin, a burglary suspect, was killed after being discovered by five SWAT officers.

When enhanced by an audio forensic specialist, the video’s soundtrack indicated Franklin was alive and pleading for his life for more than a minute after police claimed he’d already been shot dead. Officers could be heard yelling at Franklin and using racial epithets, among them: “Come out little n—-r. Don’t go putting those hands up now!” according to a wrongful death suit filed by Franklin’s family. The City of Minneapolis settled the suit in 2020 for almost $800,000.

Freeman said that he was “disappointed with” the BCA’s response, adding “we are evaluating our options.” He declined to elaborate.

In an earlier interview with TIME, the prosecutor said the Franklin case “troubled me” and that his office had “learned some lessons” about investigating police killings in the eight years since. He credited the family’s lawsuit, and a book self-published by the family’s lawyer, Mike Padden, for challenging the police version and gathering “surprising” and “intriguing” evidence that appears to implicate the Minneapolis officers, all of whom remain on the force. “It was fairly extraordinary investigative work by Padden and his people,” Freeman said on July 14.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison appeared even more animated in a separate interview the following day, saying he was “shocked and appalled” reading TIME’s account of the Franklin case. “This thing is going to build, because if it is what it looks like–and we don’t know yet—it’s very very concerning,” Ellison said, repeating “If it is what it looks like.”

Ellison’s office prosecuted former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd after taking over the lead in the case from Freeman, whose office provided lawyers and shared in the cost of the trial. Along with Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington, whose office includes the BCA, the fellow Democrats also worked closely on a state task force aimed at reducing officer-involved shootings in Minnesota even before Floyd’s murder. Among its recommendations was establishing a separate “use of force” unit inside the BCA devoted exclusively to investigating allegations of police misconduct—though BCA superintendent Drew Evans, in his letter to Freeman, wrote that “it was not contemplated that this new unit would examine past investigations by other agencies.”

Evans also wrote that the bystander video does not qualify as new evidence because the Minneapolis Police had included an unexamined version of the recording in the file it provided Freeman’s office in 2013, when police shootings still went before a grand jury. But Evans did not address other troubling evidence gathered for the wrongful death suit, including a forensic firearms expert’s reconstruction of the shooting, which showed two of the shots that killed Franklin were fired by police pistols held side by side to his head and apparently fired simultaneously, according to an investigator hired by the family.

Padden, the lawyer for the Franklin family, agreed with Freeman that the BCA letter will not be the last word. “It’s disappointing because as I’m sitting in my office, no independent agency has ever done an investigation of the killing of young Mr. Franklin,” the attorney said in a statement. “We are confident however that Mr. Freeman, Mr. Ellison, and Mr. Harrington will do the right thing, which is criminal charges against the MPD SWAT team that entered the basement.”