Mother of Travis Jordan sues city of Minneapolis, officers who fatally shot mentally ill man in 2018
Star TribuneNov 10, 2021
The mother of
When reached on Wednesday, Ching's attorney,
"[A] plea to cops. If you respond to a call with a possibly suicidal person who throws a note out before walking toward you with a knife at his side, that person is probably not trying to kill you, but trying to get you to kill him. Don't let him win. Find a way to get him help instead," he wrote.
The city attorney's office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment through a spokesman on Wednesday, and
The lawsuit says that on the afternoon of
Keyes and Walsh responded to the call and had a brief exchange with Jordan, who eventually came out of the house in the 3700 block of
Body camera footage showed Keyes and Walsh pleading with him to drop the knife before he walked toward them and they shot him eight times. He died later at an area hospital.
But, in her lawsuit, Ching maintained that the officers ignored their department training on defusing such situations, which would have told them to call someone in crisis by their name to establish "rapport and trust" or seek cover behind a nearby parked car to create distance between themselves and Jordan.
"In fact, they escalated the situation with their demands to come outside and conflicting orders once Travis appeared in the doorway of his home," the suit read. "Less than one minute elapsed between Keyes' demand for Travis to come out of the house from the side yard and the shooting."
And since neither officer was carrying a Taser, they could have waited for the arrival of a Park police officer who had one of the less-lethal devices, the suit argued. The officers, she argued, should've known that Jordan was "suffering from a disability of depression with suicidal ideation" based on the dispatcher's notes, and should have taken that into account when they encountered him.
"Travis was entitled to reasonable policing services as any non-disabled member of
The shooting came amid a national debate involving when and how police officers use force against the mentally ill, and renewed calls locally for better police responses to people in crisis. Some of those efforts culminated with the passage of state a bill this year, called Travis' Law, that would require 911 operators to refer mental health calls to mobile crisis teams "when appropriate."
Bosman also represented Jordan's girlfriend,
The case resurfaced after the killing of
Officers will still respond to some mental health-related emergencies, for instance those involving a weapon, but the new mobile response teams will be dispatched to many behavioral health calls. The program, operated by
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