Five families and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension have reached a settlement in a lawsuit the families filed against the agency over obtaining investigative case files about their sons’ fatal shootings by law enforcement.
The settlement, reached Monday, is for $165,000. The families now have access to their sons’ full case files, and the BCA will provide information to families in the future about how to obtain reports in such cases and their loved ones’ personal effects, according to attorney Paul Bosman, who represents the families.
When a deadly force investigation is completed and if a prosecutor decides not to charge the officers, which was the situation in the five cases, the case file must be made available to families within 10 days of their request, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit alleged the BCA violated the state’s public records law, known as the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act.
The BCA said in its legal response in January that the requests for information weren’t made in accordance with the Data Practices Act, so they hadn’t violated the act. The agency said they have written procedures, publicly available on the BCA’s website, that require the parents of a deceased person to provide a certified copy of their child’s birth and death certificates, along with other means, and they said they hadn’t received that documentation before the lawsuit was filed.
“These families had only heard the police press releases, the police union statements, and the county attorneys’ rationales for not charging the involved officers,” Bosman said. “That’s what their neighbors had heard, too. They couldn’t defend their loved ones names or begin putting their grief to rest, because even though they were entitled to the data about what happened, the BCA wasn’t giving it to them.”
The BCA said in a Tuesday statement that it “chose to settle this lawsuit to limit the cost, both financially and emotionally, on those involved.”
“Prior to this lawsuit being filed, the BCA had already sought and secured funding from the Legislature to bolster our data practices team,” the statement continued. “Requests for data from the BCA have increased dramatically in recent years and this additional funding and staffing will mean faster responses for anyone who requests information in the coming years.”
Families: Files needed to understand
The families’ lawsuit said by the BCA not providing the reports, the families “have been damaged not only in their rights to the information under the law” and “in their ability to understand what happened regarding the death of their loved one.”
The BCA provided reports and videos after the lawsuit was filed in November. The families who were part of the lawsuit waited a couple of months to 16 months to get access to the case files, according to Bosman.
With a three-year statute of limitations to file a wrongful-death lawsuit, “waiting about that half that time before you can even see the 1,500 to 2,000 pages of data and video puts families at a great disadvantage legally,” Bosman said Tuesday.
The settlement “is not a huge” amount, but “it’s enough … to hopefully dissuade the BCA from ignoring requests” going forward, Bosman said.
In its legal response to the lawsuit, the BCA wrote that while it did not provide information within 10 days, that was not a violation of the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act nor had the agency “unreasonably delayed the release of any data.”
The lawsuit was filed by the families of Okwan Sims, shot by Stillwater officers last year; Dolal Idd and Tekle Sundberg, shot by Minneapolis officers in 2020 and 2022, respectively; Zachary Shogren, shot by a Duluth officer shot last year; and Brent Alsleben, shot by Hutchinson officers in 2022.
Sundberg, Shogren and Alsleben were each “in the midst of a mental health crisis” during their encounters with law enforcement, Bosman wrote in the lawsuit. The families of Shogren and Alsleben “share an advocacy mission” of educating “the community, and particularly law enforcement, about the importance of mental health” and, in order to do that, they “must understand what happened” in their loved ones’ final moments, the lawsuit said.
The BCA had already released the case file in Idd’s case and his family was requesting specific squad camera footage. The BCA said in its legal response that public portions of all squad videos in the case had been publicly posted on the agency’s website since 2022 and that no squad camera footage reviewed during the BCA investigation captured the shooting of Idd.
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