The daughter of a 65-year-old man who she says was deaf in one ear and couldn’t understand police has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against St. Paul police and the city after an officer shot him last year.
The action comes a month after prosecutors announced Officer Abdirahmin Dahir’s use of deadly force against Yia Xiong was “objectively reasonable to stop the deadly threat posed” by Xiong, who they said was armed with a 12-inch knife, and was legal under Minnesota law.
The lawsuit was filed by Yia Xiong’s daughter, Mai Tong Xiong. She is represented by Farrar & Ball, a Houston, Texas-based law firm, that says it brought the first defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones on behalf of Sandy Hook Elementary School parents and won a $50 million verdict, brought a defamation lawsuit in October against Elon Musk on behalf of a young man falsely accused of being a neo-Nazi and secured a $980 million verdict last year over Mitsubishi’s defective seat belt design.
“Our family is heartbroken that our Minnesota public officials refuse to address this injustice, but we are committed to making sure my father’s death is not just another statistic,” Mai Tong Xiong said in a Wednesday statement. “We cannot allow this to happen to another family.”
Kamal Baker, Mayor Melvin Carter’s spokesman, said Wednesday: “The city is aware of the complaint and will engage in a thorough review before responding to the court.”
Lawsuit: ‘Killed in under 30 seconds after contact’
In the lawsuit, attorneys Mark Bankston and Kyle Farrar, along with Roseville-based attorney Neil Clemmer, wrote that “demands for police reform by Minnesota citizens grew increasingly desperate” over the past decade. “These calls for reform intensified in a summer-long series of public demonstrations in 2020” after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis officer.
Reforms “have resulted in good policies, and the officers in this case were trained under those new policies, but there remains a culture in Minnesota law enforcement that encourages officers to intentionally disregard these reforms, treating the new policies as political lip service while continuing to engage in combative, militaristic forms of policing,” they wrote in the lawsuit.
Dahir and Officer Noushue Cha, who used a Taser in the incident, “encouraged by the culture of the St. Paul Police Department, deliberately ignored those policies,” the lawsuit continued. “As a result, Yia Xiong was killed in under 30 seconds after contact.”
Birthday party altercation with armed man
Officers Cha and Dahir responded to the Winslow Commons, where Xiong lived in the 100 block of South Western Avenue near West Seventh Street about 5 p.m. Feb. 11, 2023.
Yia Xiong in his Vietnam War uniform (Courtesy photo)
“Two 911 callers had reported that a member of their family armed with a gun had an altercation with an elderly man in the apartment complex commons area where a birthday party was taking place,” the lawsuit said. “The callers reported that after the initial argument, the elderly man had returned holding a knife.”
Xiong was “partially deaf, and understood almost no English,” the lawsuit said. “Like many of the elderly Hmong war refugees who were re-settled in St. Paul, Yia Xiong had been recruited into the CIA’s clandestine war in Laos, where he served heroically and became a highly decorated soldier in the Royal Lao Army while fighting on America’s behalf. It was because of his service that Mr. Xiong suffered hearing loss and severe combat trauma.”
On the day of the 911 calls, Xiong had wandered into a birthday party for a child that was taking place in the building’s party room.
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“Mr. Xiong attempted to give money to the child, as part of Hmong culture at birthdays,” the lawsuit said. “The attendees of the party, who were not Hmong, reacted with alarm to the presence of an interloper. An altercation developed between Mr. Xiong and the child’s father, who had a firearm.”
Xiong left the area and when he later returned, he was seen holding a traditional Hmong kitchen/gardening knife called a “cuaj puam.”
“Ultimately no violence or confrontation occurred,” the lawsuits said. “Relatives at the party called 911, telling dispatch that Mr. Xiong had threatened them. The 911 transcripts also show that dispatch was informed that the subject was an elderly Hmong man. Only a tiny percentage of elderly Hmong in St. Paul can speak any English. The 911 transcripts also state that Mr. Xiong was acting in an unusual manner.”
Officers’ first contact with Xiong
Two officers made contact with Xiong in a common area of the building when he was “calmly talking to another resident of the apartment complex,” the lawsuit said, referring to officers’ body camera footage. “There was nothing threatening or aggressive about Mr. Xiong’s demeanor.”
“When the officers begin to approach and start shouting, Mr. Xiong turns to his neighbors next to him, raises his arms to his sides, palms up, in the universal gesture for ‘I don’t understand what is going on,’” the lawsuit said.
In a memo from the Ramsey County attorney’s and Minnesota attorney general’s offices about their review of the investigation by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and why they weren’t charging Dahir, they wrote: “Officer Dahir, and his SPPD colleagues, had no objective reason to believe that Mr. Xiong did not understand the multiple orders given to him by officers to ‘stop’ and ‘drop the knife.’ To the contrary, when ordered three times in the lobby by Officer Dahir and his colleagues to ‘Drop the knife!’ Mr. Xiong briefly stopped and displayed his hands as if to show the officers that he understood their orders and was not in possession of the knife.”
Encounter at apartment
Xiong started walking away from the officers toward his apartment.
“Officers began yelling ‘Drop the knife’ at Mr. Xiong,” the lawsuit said. “There was no sign that Mr. Xiong understood or even heard the officers” and he kept walking. “The officers then yelled, ‘Get your hands out of your pockets!’ and ‘Hey come here!’ Again, there is no indication that Mr. Xiong understood or even heard the officers.”
As two officers followed Xiong down the hallway, he was “calmly flipping through his key ring to find his apartment door key,” the lawsuit continued. “An officer yelled ‘Get your hands out of your pockets.’ At this point, Mr. Xiong did not have his hands in his pockets. But it doesn’t matter, because again, there is no indication that Mr. Xiong understood or even heard the officers. Instead, Mr. Xiong continued to unlock the door.”
Xiong opened his apartment door and “calmly entered,” the lawsuit said. An officer yelled, “Don’t let him in!” Dahir kicked the door and then opened it.
The prosecutors’ said in their memo that video showed officers “quickly rush to the door to prevent Mr. Xiong from entering the apartment. A written statement provided by Officer Dahir said that ‘we could not let the male inside the door due to not knowing who else was in the room and the possibility of the male hurting somebody else in the room.’”
The lawsuit said Dahir and Cha both “began yelling unintelligibly at Mr. Xiong,” as Dahir aimed a rifle at him and Cha pointed his Taser.
“Mr. Xiong, confused and startled, then entered the doorway, holding the cuaj puam in his hands,” the lawsuit continued.
The prosecutors wrote in their memo that officers’ body-worn camera footage showed “Mr. Xiong holding the knife in an aggressive manner as he … begins to quickly emerge through his apartment door toward the officers, despite their continued orders for him to stop.”
The officers were about five feet from Xiong, who was advancing with the blade facing the officers, when both fired at him, Dahir with the rifle and Cha with the Taser, the memo said.
An autopsy determined Xiong died of multiple gunshot wounds. It also noted he’d been drinking — his blood-alcohol level was 0.2, more than twice the legal limit for driving.
The lawsuit alleges the officers were “negligent under state law for intentionally disregarding St. Paul Police Department policies and training, resulting in Yia Xiong’s death.”
“The intentional disregard shown by the … officers was especially egregious in that it resulted in prejudicial disparate treatment due to Yia Xiong’s vulnerable status as (1) a Hmong immigrant unable to converse in English, (2) an elderly individual with a hearing disability, (3) a veteran with combat trauma,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit does not indicate how much Xiong’s daughter is seeking in damages.
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