Protests have broken out near the US city of Minneapolis after the police shot Duante Wright, a young Black man who later died, with police using tear gas and flash bangs to disperse the crowd at Brooklyn Center on Sunday night.
The 20-year-old Black man’s mother told a crowd earlier on Sunday evening that he called her to say he had been pulled over by police, local media reported.
Katie Wright said she heard officers tell her son to put his phone down, and then one of the officers ended the call. Soon after, her son’s girlfriend told her he had been shot.
The shooting comes as former police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for the murder of George Floyd, a Black man from Minneapolis. Floyd’s killing sparked months of protests in the US against racism and police brutality and attracted international outrage.
Photos from the protests showed men stomping on the windshield of a police cruiser. Police fired nonlethal rounds to try to disperse the protesters, according to the Star Tribune.
After about an hour, the police presence eased, and the crowd lit candles and wrote messages such as “Justice for Daunte Wright” in chalk on the street.
But clashes broke out again soon after as another group of several hundred protesters gathered outside the Brooklyn Center Police Headquarters and were met with teargas and flash bangs.
‘Tragic’
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said it is “investigating an officer-involved shooting incident” in Brooklyn Center but declined to identify the victim.
According to a statement from the Brooklyn Center Police Department, officers pulled over a driver for a traffic violation. When they discovered he had an outstanding warrant, they tried to take him into custody.
He got back into his car, and one of the officers fired their weapon, striking the driver, who died at the scene.
A female passenger in the car suffered “non-life threatening injuries” and was transported to a local hospital, said the statement, which did not identify the woman.
Brooklyn City mayor Mike Elliott called the shooting “tragic”.
“We are asking the protesters to continue to be peaceful and that peaceful protesters are not dealt with force,” he wrote on Twitter.