The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office has declined to file charges against the officers involved in the July 2022 death of Andrew Tekle Sundberg.
Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said his office reviewed hundreds of hours of body-camera video and other evidence from the scene, concluding that “the officers’ use of deadly force was authorized.”
“Mr. Sundberg’s death was a tragedy,” Freeman said. “Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Mr. Sundberg. People who are suffering from mental health crises are vulnerable, and encounters between those in crisis and law enforcement must be handled with special care. In this case, tragic as it is, the officers’ use of deadly force was legally authorized under Minnesota law.”
Minneapolis police responded to Sundberg’s apartment complex July 13 around 9:30 p.m. after a woman said he was firing a gun into her apartment where she was looking after her two young children. Sundberg was shot by police snipers early the next morning after a six-hour standoff.
Freeman’s 39-page report on the shooting says Sundberg was “threatening to shoot officers and was breaking windows.”
“The written statements from some officers noted that Mr. Sundberg appeared agitated during this time and there was a feeling of concern that Mr. Sundberg was about to come out shooting. A short time later, Mr. Sundberg can be heard breaking the windows again, and then two gunshots are heard. During this time, another officer on the ground said several times that Mr. Sundberg had a gun while the glass can be heard breaking,” the report says.
The woman who reported Sundberg confronted activists who were protesting his death.
“My kids have to deal with this and probably have a mental illness now because they almost lost their lives. There’s bullet holes in my kitchen because he sat in the f–ing hallway watching me move,” she told them. “He tried to kill me in front of my kids.”
Freeman said “all of the elements of the use-of-deadly-force statute have been met in this case,” meaning the officers’ “use of deadly force was legally authorized, and criminal charges are not appropriate.”
“It is not possible to know Mr. Sundberg’s intentions or exact mental state, but those are not determinative in this legal analysis,” Freeman said. “Instead, we must analyze the use of deadly force based only on what an objectively reasonable officer in the officers’ positions would have known or perceived, and not on what Mr. Sundberg’s intentions may have been.”
Anthony Gockowski
Anthony Gockowski is Editor-in-Chief of Alpha News. He previously worked as an editor for The Minnesota Sun and Campus Reform, and wrote for the Daily Caller.
