April 13, 2021: A suburb of Minneapolis was under curfew early Monday after US police fatally shot a young Black man, sparking protests not far from where a former police officer was on trial for the murder of George Floyd.
The victim was identified by his family as 20-year-old Daunte Wright. According to the reports, Wright was shot by the police before getting back into his car and driving away, then crashing the vehicle several blocks away. He was later pronounced dead, Wright's kin said.
The incident took place 10 miles (16 km) from where George Floyd was killed during an arrest in Minneapolis last May, Reuters reported, adding that angry crowds protested outside the Brooklyn Center Police Department building on Sunday night, while officers in riot gear fired rubber bullets and lobbed flash bangs at protesters and let off clouds of chemical irritants.
America is still recuperating with the death of George Floyd, who was killed last year after Derek Chauvin, one of the police officers who arrived on the scene, knelt on Floyd's neck for over nine minutes. After his death, protests against police brutality, especially towards Black people, quickly spread across the United States and internationally. Tensions are running high in Minneapolis, already on edge and midway through the ongoing trial of Derek Chauvin, who is charged with murder and manslaughter, in George Floyd’s death. In the hours after the shooting on Sunday, protesters clashed with police in riot gear, breaking a cruiser’s windshield as police fired nonlethal rounds, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said in a statement that he was monitoring the unrest in Brooklyn Center, a suburb of Minneapolis, as "our state mourns another life of a Black man taken by law enforcement."
“I am closely monitoring the situation in Brooklyn Center. Gwen and I are praying for Daunte Wright’s family as our state mourns another life of a Black man taken by law enforcement,” Governor Tim Walz said in a statement posted late Sunday night on Twitter.
Meanwhile, the Wrights demanded answers from police. Katie Wright, Daunte's mother, tearfully pleaded for more information regarding the incident and for her son’s body to be moved from the street. She told reporters at the scene, according to Reuters, that she received a call from her son on Sunday afternoon telling her that police had pulled him over for having air fresheners dangling from his rear-view mirror, illegal in Minnesota. She could hear police tell her son to get out the vehicle, she said.
Public mourners included Wright's family and friends who gathered, wept and consoled each other alongside protesters who carried “Black Lives Matter” flags, jumped atop police cars, confronted officers and walked peacefully in columns with their hands help up. On one street, written in multi-colored chalk: “Justice for Daunte Wright.”