RAID LEAVES FAMILY OF MAN KILLED BY POLICE SHAKEN

Family not told of death until after home searched

Bayle Gelle said he awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of his wife screaming. He plunged down the stairs and found her in the living room, being confronted by sheriff ’s deputies.

The officers turned their guns toward him, he said, and they were barking orders he struggled to understand.

Gelle, who came to the United States in 1997 from a war-torn Somalia, would be told later that night that his 23-year-old son, Dolal Idd, had been shot and killed just hours before by police officers in a gas station parking lot in nearby Minneapolis.

The fatal police shooting Wednesday would be the first in Minneapolis since the killing of George Floyd in May, which led to hundreds of protests across the country and an outpouring of calls for police reform. But as Gelle sat on the floor that night, his wrists restrained in plastic handcuffs, he had no idea that his son had been killed.

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that its deputies acted “professionally and politely and followed procedure” as they executed a search warrant on the home in Eden Prairie, a suburb of Minneapolis.

Gelle said the deputies shouted at him and his younger children, ages 4, 7 and 9, but did not immediately identify themselves when he asked who they were. The deputies told him to sit and continued to restrain Gelle and his wife in plastic cuffs as they secured the home. His 18year-old son and his 19year-old daughter were also restrained.

The younger children were not placed in handcuffs but were crying amid the chaos, Gelle said. He said the deputies neither showed him the warrant nor told him what they were looking for at first.

Only as the officers were making their exit, Gelle said, did they tell him his son had been killed.

The shooting occurred earlier that night, at about 6:15 p.m., when officers stopped Idd in his car at a gas station. Police said later that officers had suspected he had a weapon.

Body-camera footage shows police cruisers attempting to box in Idd as he tries to pull away in a white sedan.

The footage then shows the driver’s side window exploding outward, suggesting Idd fired at the officers. One officer curses and ducks before he and at least one other officer begin to fire. A gun was later found in the car, police said.

Police officers and city officials said Idd shot first, but activists who have protested the shooting, along with the family, maintain the footage is unclear.

In a statement, the Hennepin County Sheriff ’s Office said it was regular procedure to handcuff all adults while executing high-risk search warrants. The operation was labeled high-risk because the earlier shooting gave officers reason to believe there might be weapons in the home.

Gelle said he had no knowledge of his son owning or carrying a gun.