Several of Daunte Wright’s family members were in attendance at the trial of Kim Potter on Wednesday, saying afterward that they "are eager for accountability and to have people understand how much we still grieve his loss.”
"The fact that this trial is taking place during the holidays further emphasizes his absence in our world and we hope the jury holds Kim Potter accountable for her actions,” the family said in a statement.
Ben Crump, a prominent civil rights attorney who represents the family in civil matters, said that Daunte Wright should still be with his family today.
“This encounter was a pre-textual, unnecessary stop of a young Black man for nothing more than a minor traffic infraction,” Crump said in a statement along with attorneys Antonio Romanucci and Jeff Storms.
“Kim Potter’s conduct was not a mere accident or a mistake but an unlawful and unconstitutional use of force under the 4th Amendment. It never should have happened."
Judge Regina Chu dismissed jurors for the evening shortly before 5 p.m. CT after the first full day of testimony in the trial of former suburban Minneapolis police officer Kim Potter.
The jurors heard opening statements from the defense and prosecution in the morning, then heard testimony in the afternoon from Daunte Wright’s mother, Katie Bryant, and Brooklyn Center police officer Anthony Luckey, who was being trained by Potter at the time of the shooting.
The trial starts again at 9 a.m. CT on Thursday.
{{#rendered}}Multiple different body camera videos were played for the jury in court that depict the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright.
As Officers Andrew Luckey and Kim Potter attempt to arrest Wright on a warrant, Wright resisted and tried to get back into his car.
Potter warned Wright twice that she would tase him, then yelled, “Taser, taser, taser,” and shot him once in the chest with her handgun, killing him.
"Ah s—! I just shot him,” Potter yelled as Wright drove off. "I grabbed the wrong f------ gun. I shot him. Oh my God.”
Potter then sat down on the curb and yelled, "Oh my God,” multiple times while crying and rocking back and forth.
"I’m going to go to prison,” Potter said moments later.
"No you’re not," Luckey responded.
"Kim, that guy was trying to take off with me in the car," Sgt. Mychal Johnson added.
Anthony Luckey, who was being trained by Kim Potter when she fatally shot Daunte Wright, testified Wednesday that he was trying to stop Wright from getting back in his car and drive off when Potter yelled, “Taser, taser, taser,” and shot Wright once in the chest.
Luckey told the prosecution that he pulled Wright over because he had expired license tags and an air freshener in the rearview.
Wright then informed the officers that he did not have a driver’s license and that he had just bought the car from his brother, so hadn’t transferred the registration yet. Luckey noted that the car smelled like marijuana and he saw marijuana residue in the middle console.
When Luckey ran Wright’s name and date of birth on his computer, a warrant on an outstanding weapons charge and protection order against Wright came up.
A woman told Fox News Digital that she got a restraining order against Wright after he shoved a gun in her face and tried to rob her of $820 at her apartment in December 2019.
Sgt. Mychal Johnson, the officers’ supervisor, arrived at the scene as Luckey and Wright decided to place Wright under arrest on the warrant.
Luckey said that Wright was “very hesitant” to get out of the vehicle.
"I was able to get my handcuffs out, and immediately when I placed the left handcuff on his wrist, he jerked his arm back. Right when he starts to tense up, I basically just told him, ‘Don’t do it bro,’” Luckey said.
"I heard [Potter] say, 'I’m going to tase you,' I believe a second time. That is when I heard, ‘Taser, taser.' … Then I just heard a bang.”
Luckey said that a projectile from the gun hit his face and Wright drove off.
"She became hysterical and stated that she shot him,” Luckey said, adding that he saw Potter put her firearm back in her holster.
Daunte Wright’s mother, Katie Bryant, took the witness stand and tearfully recounted what happened on the day that her 20-year-old son was shot and killed in April.
Bryant said that Wright called him after he was pulled over for having an air freshener on his rearview mirror and expired tags. An officer came back to the car and asked Wright to put the phone down and get out of the car.
After the phone was hung up, she FaceTimed her son back multiple times and eventually a female passenger picked up the call.
“A female answered the phone as I was FaceTiming and she was screaming. And I was like, ‘What’s wrong?' And she said, ‘They shot him,' and faced the phone toward the driver’s seat, and my son was laying there. He was unresponsive. He looked dead. And I heard somebody say hang up the phone again, and it disconnected again,” Bryant said.
The prosecution played a video of Bryant frantically arriving at the scene.
"I was so distraught. I didn’t know what was happening,” Bryant said. "I didn’t want to believe that was my son laying on the ground but I could tell it was him because of his tennis shoes."
Wright’s mom then told a defense attorney under cross-examination that Wright did not have a driver’s license at the time and there was no car insurance on the vehicle.
Officers tried to arrest Wright because he had an outstanding warrant for a weapons violation, which Bryant said she was not aware of until she arrived at the scene.
{{#rendered}}EXCLUSIVE: Struggling with loss, she moved out on her own at 18, got a job and did her best to make ends meet – until Daunte Wright showed up in her Minnesota living room with a handgun and tried to steal from her.
"Everybody feels so horrible for this man, but no one takes the time to see how horrible of a person he was," says a Minnesota woman who police allege Wright choked and robbed at gunpoint.
At 15, a concussion ended her dreams of a soccer career.
Still in her teens, her father died. And she found out she needed brain surgery. After that, she said, she fell in with an abusive boyfriend.
By 20, she kicked him out and let a friend sleep in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment to help pay rent.
And then a high school acquaintance brought Wright over, and he allegedly shoved a pistol in her face, choked her and threatened her life in a failed attempt to steal $820 she meant to give to her landlord one day in December 2019.
"What just blows my mind is that someone can literally strangle someone to where they can’t breathe, they can’t even gasp for air, because their airways are getting crushed," she told Fox News Digital in her first news interview. "No one should have to go through something like that and then have to accept death at 20 years old – looking into somebody’s eyes while they are holding a loaded gun to you."
Click here to read more on Fox News.
Daunte Wright had an open warrant for his arrest related to an aggravated armed robbery attempt when he was killed, according to court records.
Wright and another man, identified as Emajay Maurice Driver, a high school acquaintance, had both been charged with first-degree aggravated robbery in a December 2019 incident in Osseso, Minnesota, Hennepin County District Court documents obtained by Fox News show.
Driver appeared Wednesday at a press conference involving the Wright family while the trial was in a lunch break.
The victim of that robbery incident told Fox News this week that Driver had reached out to her over Snapchat before Wright later showed up in her Minnesota living room with a handgun and tried to steal from her.
{{#rendered}}Defense attorney Paul Engh revealed Wednesday that during her 26-year career in law enforcement, Kim Potter “never fired a gun, she never fired one shot, she never fired a taser and never had to.
“She was good at de-escalating everything and here that is what she was trying to do,” Engh said, adding that “’I’ll tase you’ is another way of saying ‘please stop so I don’t have to hurt you.’”
Engh in his opening statements appeared animated, sometimes pounding on the lectern in an apparent bid on drive home points he was making to the jury.
"Mrs. Potter’s good name has been besmirched by this allegation which is not true and by the press coverage which has been slanted,” Engh said while wrapping up the defense’s opening argument. "And we seek to reclaim it, and reclaim it we will.”
The jury is now on a lunch break and will reconvene at 2:30 p.m. ET.
Paul Engh, one of the attorneys representing Kim Potter, begins the defense's opening argument by saying that “all Mr. Wright had to do was stop.
“He was told he was arrested on a warrant. He resisted, she said ‘I'll tase you’ and all he had to do was surrender,” Engh said. “That wasn’t his plan, he continued on with his struggle.”
“She knows that if he is not stopped – Mr. Wright’s not stopped – he is about to drive away with a police officer dangling from his car," Engh later said.
“She made a mistake. This was an accident. She is a human being," he added. "But she had to do what she had to do to prevent a death to a fellow officer too.”
The prosecution argued in their opening statement at the Kim Potter trial that the former Brooklyn Center police officer showed a colleague she was training on April 11 how to kill someone.
Erin Eldridge also noted to the jury that Potter had been a police officer longer than 20-year-old Daunte Wright was alive. Wright’s son, she added, is now fatherless.
The prosecution is expected to call forward witnesses including Wright’s girlfriend and the officer she had been training on the day of the shooting, amongst others.
It also appears the prosecution will be taking the jury through several points such as the training and de-escalation tactics Potter went learned prior to the incident and who Wright was as a person, according to Fox News' Jiovanni Lieggi.
{{#rendered}}Kim Potter's attorneys are set to make their opening statement soon.
Prosecutor Erin Eldridge says when a Brooklyn Center Police Officer Anthony Luckey told Daunte Wright during the traffic stop that he was being placed in handcuffs because of an arrest warrant, that was when "scared Daunte tried to get away.
"He tried to get back in the car. He tried to leave," Eldridge said.
She made the remark while detailing the sequence of events which led to Wright being shot by Potter.
"Daunte Wright was unarmed. He had no weapon. He was not violent, he did not threaten the officers in any way. He didn't reach for anything," Eldridge said. "He got in the car, put his hands on the steering wheel, didn't come at the officers, didn't throw any punches, didn't kick anyone. He just pulled away and got back in the car while Officer Luckey was trying to maintain his grip on Daunte Wright's clothing to pull him back out."
The Minneapolis Black Lives Matter activist charged with intimidating the judge presiding over the trial for former police officer Kim Potter was ordered held without bond on Tuesday – meaning he will remain jailed at least for the first two weeks of the high profile case involving Daunte Wright's death.
Cortez Rice’s defense lawyer tried to argue that his client’s comments while livestreaming himself at a downtown Minneapolis condominium on Nov. 6 were taken out of context by "White supremacist type groups" who reposted snippets of the video online.
Minneapolis civil rights attorney Jordan Kushner asserted that Rice’s participation in a protest at the assumed home of Judge Regina Chu were within his constitutional First Amendment protections of free speech.
Click here to read more on Fox News.
{{#rendered}}Erin Eldridge, an assistant attorney general with the Minnesota Attorney General's Office, says in opening statements for the prosecution that Brooklyn Center Police Officers have a duty “to protect life, not to take life.”
“We trust them not to use those weapons rashly or recklessly and we expect not to be shot dead on the street for no reason. We expect them not to betray their badge and we expect them to uphold their oath,” Eldridge said.
“We trust them to know wrong from right and left from right. This case is about an officer who knew not to get it dead wrong, but she failed to get it right,” she continued. “This case is about the defendant, Kimberly Potter, betraying her badge and betraying her oath and betraying her position of public trust.
“And on April 11 of this year she betrayed a 20-year-old kid,” Eldridge said. “She pulled out her firearm, she pointed it at his chest and she shot and killed Daunte Wright.”
A pair of protesters were braving single-digit temperatures while demonstrating outside the Hennepin County Government Center Wednesday.
A Fox News Digital reporter on-scene witnessed two others in a van nearby blasting music with the profanity "F--- the police."
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – The name "Daunte Wright" is on full display across the Minneapolis area this week, as the community hunkers down once again for the beginning of the trial of ex-police officer Kim Potter.
A picture of Wright, who was 20 years old when Potter shot him during a traffic stop in an alleged stun gun-firearm mix-up, has been placed under the sculpture of a fist in George Floyd Square. Wright's name is also on a marquee that calls for passersby to demand justice over his killing.
Wright, a Black man, was killed in April in the suburb of Brooklyn Center, as tensions were already high in the Twin Cities region during the murder trial of former police officer Derek Chauvin for Floyd's death.
As Potter’s trial begins just weeks before Christmas, newly erected signs outside the Brooklyn Center Police Department encourage visitors to the "protest area" to be courteous, as the apartment building across the street is home to families. The sign asks protesters to leave by 9:30 p.m.
Click here to read more on Fox News.
{{#rendered}}There were no demonstrators spotted outside the Hennepin County Government Center on Wednesday morning as the trial is now underway.
The manslaughter trial for former Minnesota Police Officer Kim Potter is beginning with opening statements Wednesday, nearly eight months after the veteran cop shot and killed Daunte Wright while trying to arrest the young Black man during a traffic stop in a Minneapolis suburb.
Potter, 49, had been an officer for 26 years and was working for the Brooklyn Center Police Department on April 11, 2021, when she and other officers, including a trainee, attempted to stop Wright and then tried to arrest him after learning of a warrant for his arrest.
Wright, 20, can be seen in a police video climbing back into the driver’s seat of a vehicle as the officers scuffle with him. In Potter’s body camera video from the shooting, she can be heard yelling, "I’ll tase you!" and "Taser! Taser! Taser!" before firing her handgun.
She can then be heard saying, "I grabbed the wrong f------ gun," followed by: "Holy s---, I just shot him."
Potter resigned from the police department just days later. She has been charged with first- and second-degree manslaughter.
Click here to read more on Fox News.
MINNEAPOLIS – Attorneys and a judge overseeing the trial for Kim Potter gathered in a Minneapolis courtroom on Monday to hammer out final instructions for the panel of jurors tasked with deciding the former Minnesota police officer’s fate, with the jurist rejecting the defense’s efforts to make the instructions more expansive for their client’s benefit.
Potter, 49 is charged with first- and second-degree manslaughter for fatally shooting Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, in April 2021.
Potter, who was a police officer for 26 years, resigned from the Brooklyn Center Police Department two days after the April 11 shooting and has argued that she meant to use her Taser – but grabbed her gun instead – after Wright tried to drive away from the police while they were arresting him.
Hennepin County Judicial Court Judge Regina M. Chu said she would finalize the jury instruction on when police may use deadly force after hearing some testimony during the trial. She rejected a defense request to add an instruction to note that fleeing a police officer is a violent felony. Chu said that’s not always the case. She said police officers may testify that fleeing an officer is a crime of violence. - Stephanie Pagones
{{#rendered}}Coverage for this event has ended.