The meditation coach, Justine Ruszczyk, who had spent most of her life in Australia, was unarmed and barefoot, wearing pajama pants and a pink T-shirt with the image of a koala. She had heard someone screaming and was nervous enough to have called 911 twice.
The policeman, Mohamed Noor, whose distinction as the precinct’s first Somali-American officer had been celebrated months earlier by the mayor, answered the call. He didn’t find anyone yelling, and told dispatchers that everything was fine.
But a few seconds later, just before midnight, Ruszczyk was dying on the ground, a single bullet from the officer’s service weapon lodged by her spine, her body sprawled beside the police car.
Ruszczyk’s death on a July night in 2017 shook Minneapolis — protesters marched, the police chief was fired, the mayor was soon voted out — and renewed debates about body cameras and the use of force by officers. It also led to a persistent question that still haunts Ruszczyk’s family and the city: What happened?
Ruszczyk, 40, was home by herself on a Saturday night when she called police. The noise she heard was out of place in the Fulton neighborhood, an affluent, low-crime area near the southwestern edge of Minneapolis.
When Noor and his partner, Officer Matthew Harrity, arrived at the entrance to the alley, they flipped off the headlights on their cruiser and rolled down their windows. Neither officer turned on his body camera. As they crept forward, scanning the alley with a spotlight, they heard little more than the whining of a dog.
What happened next remains a murky combination of settled fact, competing claims and unexplained mystery. Had Ruszczyk run outside to flag down the officers and startled them? Had she knocked on the back of the car to stop them from driving off? Had the officers mistaken the cellphone she was holding for a weapon?
One thing was certain: Noor fired a bullet in front of his partner, through the rolled-down driver’s window of the Explorer, and into Ruszczyk’s chest.
Omar Jamal, a consultant and activist, said there was a widespread sense among Somali-Americans in Minnesota that the death of Ruszczyk, who is white, was a tragedy but that Noor was being treated differently than a white officer would be.
Whether Noor, 33, will take the stand and tell his side of the story during his trial is uncertain. In an opening statement, Peter Wold, one of his lawyers, told jurors that Noor heard a bang and saw Harrity grasping for his gun, in terror, just before the shooting.
“Noor drew his gun to protect his partner and himself,” Wold told jurors.
Prosecutors described the shooting as something else: a murder with no reasonable explanation.
“He fired that shot,” said Patrick Lofton, a prosecutor, “without saying a word.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.