Unusual police killing raises an old outcry: Why?

Worried fiancé waited in Las Vegas as Australian was shot in Minneapolis

MINNEAPOLIS — There was something bad going on in the alleyway behind the house, she told her fiancé on the phone, someone who sounded as if she was in distress, maybe a rape. It was past 11 p.m., and most people on Washburn Avenue were furled in their beds.

Except Justine Damond, alone at home with the noises, her anxiety creeping into the loud Las Vegas casino where her fiancé had answered the phone.

They had met five years ago, when they lived 9,000 miles apart, beginning a courtship at first halting and then headlong. Now the wedding dress was ordered, the suit bought, the invitations sent, the ceremony set for an August weekend in Hawaii. But on Saturday night, July 15, they were separated again.

Her fiancé, Don Damond, told her to call 911. They stayed on the phone until she said police had arrived. Stay put, he told her. Call me back, he told her.

“I have played this over in my head over and over,” Damond said in his first interview since that night. “Why didn’t I stay on the phone with her?”

The events of the next few minutes will be anatomized and argued over and, maybe, at some point, contested in court. But this much is established: As the squad car she had summoned slid down the alley, Justine Damond went up to the police officers inside, one of whom, for reasons still unknown, fired his gun, hit her in the abdomen and killed her.

Even to Americans now used to dissecting police shootings, the circumstances were an odd jolt: a black Somali-american officer, firing at a white Australian woman among the garages and green compost bins of an unremarkable strip of Midwestern concrete.

In Australia, where Damond, 40, grew up, there was agony and disbelief, the prime minister voicing bafflement, the tabloids in full cry. In the United States, there were questions about the officer’s failure to turn on his body camera, about firearms procedures, and about the role race played in how officials responded. On Friday, the Minneapolis police chief was forced to resign.

And in interviews last week in Sydney and Minneapolis, Damond’s friends and her fiancé were trying to fill in the blanks of her final night.

More than a week has passed. A cardboard sign at the end of the alleyway, propped amid the

JENN ACKERMAN / THE NEW YORK TIMES Don Damond, whose fianceé, Justine Damond, was fatally shot by a police officer, sits Friday in the meditation room of their home in Minneapolis. Justine’s killing has provoked outrage in her native Australia, where shootings are rare. “She had her...