Hundreds of community members gathered Thursday for the funeral of Amir Rahkare Locke, the 22-year-old Black man who was fatally shot within seconds of Minneapolis police entering an apartment with a no-knock warrant for a case that had nothing to do with him.
Meanwhile, even as family, friends, and locals mourned, new details were emerging about the white cop who fired the shots that killed Locke.
Rev. Al Sharpton delivered a eulogy while surrounded by Locke’s family at the Shiloh Temple International Ministries, just two miles from the Feb. 2 disaster. The grim occasion attended by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is hardly a novel spectacle in Minneapolis, a metropolitan area stained by high-profile killings of Black men at the hands of law enforcement in recent years.
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“Amir was not guilty of anything other than being young and Black in America,” Sharpton said.
This week alone is seeing movement in at least two of those cases: On Friday, a judge is set to sentence former Brooklyn police officer Kim Potter for killing Daunte Wright in the suburb of Brooklyn Center last year, while three former Minneapolis police officers continue to face a federal trial for the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
“That’s why George Floyd’s family and Botham Jean’s sister is here, cause we’re strong enough, and we’ll keep coming back,” Sharpton said.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the Locke family, touched upon the endless cycle of police brutality in Minneapolis—and the rest of the country—during his speech at the funeral.
“Amir Locke was just sleeping on the couch while Black and the police shot and killed him. What can we do to make sure our children don’t become a hashtag?” Crump said, earning cheers from the crowd. “We have to stand up, we have to speak up and we have to fight for our children. Their lives depend on it.”
Locke’s mother, Karen Wells, slammed the Minneapolis Police Department over the death of her son, warning that reform is coming because “the chickens are coming home to roost.” His father, Andre Locke, described how he has been sick since Amir’s death.
“How can you eat something when you can barely breathe?” he said.
“Imagine if Amir was your son,” Locke asked the crowd. “Hold your sons tight, and your daughters tight as well.”
The funeral home is the same one in which 20-year-old Wright was laid to rest last April after he was fatally shot during a traffic stop launched over allegedly expired tabs.
Authorities have conceded that Locke was not the intended subject of the St. Paul homicide investigation that prompted a Minneapolis SWAT team to execute a no-knock search warrant at the Balero Flats apartment building around 7 a.m. on Feb. 2.
Police records made public last week show that St. Paul police asked for search warrants to be conducted in Minneapolis for three apartments, including the one where Locke was shot. Multiple local outlets have reported that St. Paul cops did not ask for the highly controversial no-knock procedure—one they themselves have avoided in recent years—only for their colleagues in Minneapolis to insist on one, going so far as to claim it would actually improve safety.
In gruesome footage of the incident, Locke can be seen wrapped in a blanket in the dark apartment only lit by a television. At least four officers unlock the door and enter without knocking, shouting “Police! Face forward!” as Locke stirs. As he begins to move from the couch, a pistol can be seen in his hands.
It takes about nine seconds before Minneapolis police officer Mark Hanneman begins shooting, hitting Locke three times, according to a police report obtained by The Daily Beast.
The police report and video both show that Locke was armed at the time—but while the report initially stated that he was aiming the firearm at officers, in the video the gun does not seem to be aimed at anyone. The video shows an officer firing three shots while Locke—still wrapped in a blanket—falls to the floor.
“An officer fired his duty weapon and the adult male suspect was struck. Officers immediately provided emergency aid and carried the suspect down to the lobby to meet paramedics,” the report states. “The suspect was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center where he died.”
Only adding to the horror was the realization that authorities were actually looking for Locke’s 17-year-old cousin and two others in connection with a murder in St. Paul. The relative was arrested and charged on Feb. 8 with two counts of second-degree murder. As The Daily Beast reported, the apartment where Locke was fatally shot was rented by the girlfriend of one of his cousin’s brothers.
Facing a fresh onslaught from enraged activists, Mayor Jacob Frey announced a moratorium on no-knock warrants soon after Locke’s death, even as he left the door open to their use in some circumstances.
Hanneman has been placed on administrative leave per department policy, and prosecutors are currently weighing whether to press charges in the incident that sparked new tensions in a city still traumatized by the grisly murder of Floyd nearly two years ago.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state agency that probes killings by police, is tasked with investigating the shooting that killed Locke. But the video, according to Locke’s family and many of the protesters who have routinely crowded freezing city streets in recent days, should be more than enough grounds for Hanneman to be fired and charged with a crime.
After all, Locke’s killing is not the first time Hanneman has been accused of police misconduct, court documents obtained by The Daily Beast and local news reports show.
In a federal civil rights lawsuit obtained by the Daily Beast, Hanneman was one of several cops accused of violating a man’s civil rights nearly a decade ago.
Trevor Coon alleged that he was stopped by a McLeod County deputy in December 2013 after he exited a car with a friend. Hanneman, still a Hutchinson, Minnesota, police officer at the time, was called to the scene and conducted a field sobriety and drug recognition test without cause, according to the 2014 lawsuit.
After he passed all the tests and Hanneman searched his car for almost two hours, the officer told Coon to “get the fuck out of here,” the suit claimed. Officers did not arrest or file any charges against Coon, but did impound his car. In 2015, Judge Richard Kyle ruled in Coon’s favor, ordering Hanneman and the other officers to pay him a total of $4,500.
While Coon told The Daily Beast he appreciated being contacted about Hanneman and his case, he did not wish to comment about the officer or Locke’s death. Hanneman’s lawyer on this case did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Court documents obtained by a local ABC affiliate also show that, in November 2020, Hanneman illegally searched a man while executing a search warrant in St. Paul, Minnesota. In that case, too, the cop targeted someone who was not actually being sought by investigators.
According to a judge’s ruling, “The pat search of [the St. Paul man] was unconstitutional. Police were not… justified in searching [the man]” because he “was not referenced in the warrant.”
Hanneman was not disciplined by the Minneapolis Police Department for the incident. Per 5 KSTP, Locke’s family has said that case speaks to the police department’s “custom and practice of engaging in unconstitutionally excessive searches and seizures.”
Amir Locke’s aunt, Linda Tyler, on Thursday chastised elected and law enforcement officials for their continued insistence that more training will solve the national police brutality problem.
“Stop the rhetoric that police officers need more training,” she said at the funeral. “You cannot train away racism.... If you think being a police officer is a difficult profession, try being a Black man.”
Reginald McClure, one of Locke’s cousins who works in law enforcement in Texas, was the last family member to speak at the funeral. Calling Locke his “little brother,” McClure recounted the shock he experienced when he saw the video of his cousin’s death—noting that he instantly saw problems in the raid from a law-enforcement perspective.
Those problems, he said, mean that Hanneman and the “colleagues that just stood there” should be held accountable for the incident.
