Shooting suspect arrested after overnight SWAT operation in south Minneapolis
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A 54-year-old man charged with shooting and wounding a neighbor last week in south Minneapolis was arrested early Monday following an hours-long SWAT operation.
John Sawchak has been charged with attempted murder, stalking and harassment stemming from racial bias, among other counts. Court filings allege last Wednesday’s shooting on the 3500 block of Grand Avenue followed “almost constant harassment of the victim and his wife” by Sawchak since they purchased their home more than a year ago.
The Minneapolis Police Department’s handling of the case — over the months that the neighbors reported threats, and over the days between Sawchak being charged and taken into custody — have drawn criticism, including from some city council members.
Sawchak is being held at the Hennepin County Jail ahead of an initial court appearance scheduled for Tuesday.
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Wednesday’s shooting
Sawchak was charged Thursday in the previous day’s shooting of his neighbor while the neighbor was trimming a tree in his front yard.
That neighbor — Davis Moturi — suffered a fractured spine and at least two fractured ribs. According to court documents, Moturi and his wife had previously called police at least 19 times since they bought their home in September 2023 to report “vandalism, property destruction/theft, harassment, hate speech, verbal threats, and threatened physical assaults.”
Among the incidents previously reported to police: On Oct. 8, Sawchak allegedly screamed racial slurs at Moturi and threatened to kill him while brandishing a knife. Six days later, the criminal complaint alleges, Sawchak pointed a gun at Moturi.
Moturi spoke with KARE 11 from his hospital bed last week.
“I don’t call the police for fun. I call because I want my family to be safe,” he said.
At a Friday news conference, Minneapolis Police chief Brian O’Hara said police had made multiple attempts over months to contact Sawchak at his home in the wake of the reported threats, but weren’t able to do so. He described Sawchak as someone who has mental illness and was known to have access to firearms — and he said police wanted to avoid a violent situation by arresting him outside his residence.
Moturi questioned the police department’s handling of the threats.
“If you’re saying you're scared, what does that do to me?” he told KARE 11. “You have this body armor. You have professional training. When I call for assistance, when I called (about) having a knife pointed at me, I had to wait hours and hours and hours.”
Arrest early Monday
After the shooting, and after Sawchak was charged, O’Hara said there was a delay in arresting him as the department spoke with Sawchak’s family members and a psychiatrist to gather information.
“We identified issues of concern, including issues that the individual had both firearms inside and also had knowledge of improvised explosive devices,” O’Hara said at a news conference early Monday.
He said officers exhausted other options for resolving the situation without force, leading to the SWAT response overnight. O’Hara said Sawchak emerged from his residence just before 1:30 a.m. Monday, after police told him they were about to use gas in the building.
“This is an example of what de-escalation looks like,” O’Hara said. At the time of the news conference, he said officers were still searching the residence and had not yet recovered firearms believed to be inside.
Sawchak’s first court appearance is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon. In a statement, officials with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said they’re “grateful Mr. Sawchak is in custody and the cases against him can now move forward. Our thoughts have been and continue to be with the Moturis as they recover from this deeply traumatic experience.”
City Council criticism
Several Minneapolis City Council members also questioned the department’s response to the threats and in the wake of the shooting.
“We have to take violent criminals off the street,” council member Andrea Jenkins told KARE 11 on Friday. “I’m not a police officer. I don’t know how that gets done, but I know it needs to get done.”
“This shooting highlights a number of troubling trends in our city,” council member Emily Koski wrote in a message to constituents on Sunday. “Our inability to provide help and intervention to residents in need and protect our residents from harm is unconscionable. Worse yet, our inability to problem solve in times of crisis without hiding behind excuses, blame shifting and unnecessary unacceptable rhetoric is unjustifiable.”
“This situation highlights a very serious, very real gap in our public safety system, in our services and in our approach to keeping our residents safe,” Koski wrote. “There must be a reasonable path forward that doesn’t force a choice between inaction and the extreme.”
Mayor Jacob Frey, speaking alongside O’Hara at the early Monday news conference, said “our officers did this the right way.”
“I know there have been several individuals out there, including council members, telling them to immediately barge in — to do this the wrong way,” Frey said. “I stand with our police officers. Doing this the right way takes courage.”
O’Hara, in a news conference earlier in the weekend before Sawchak was arrested, acknowledged that the department had “failed (Moturi) 100 percent because that should not have happened to him. The Minneapolis police somehow did not act urgently enough to prevent that individual from being shot — and to that victim, I say I am sorry that this happened to you.”
“But it could not be anything further from the truth to say that we did nothing, or that we just simply don’t care,” O’Hara continued. “That’s not true. But we failed to act urgently enough to prevent that shooting from happening — and unfortunately, he’s not the only victim where that’s been the case. We have not been able to respond as urgently enough as we should for countless victims in this city. I am not here to use staffing as an excuse, but I am telling you that is the reality of your police department today.”
O’Hara said a shortage of officers “impacts everything that we do.”
Audio transcript
City leaders put pressure on the Minneapolis Police Department, who said not enough was done to prevent the shooting that resulted in serious injuries to the victim. MPD made dozens of attempts to reach the man in order to arrest him since that time but said they were unable to do so.
Here's Police Chief Brian O'Hara at a press conference on Friday. This was two days after the shooting and two days before the arrest.
BRIAN O'HARA: Anyone who suggests that the cops don't want to arrest this person is simply wrong. To be frank, the officers, however, are scared. They're scared of being prosecuted if they get into a situation where they make a mistake trying to do their job and protect the public.
I'm sick and tired of hearing this situation. The reality we are in is you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. And it's got to end. If we did go in with a SWAT team and wound up in a deadly force situation, the headlines would read, MPD shoots a mentally ill person.
Because we have not and have been trying to safely and take this person into custody without further injecting violence into the situation, the headlines might read, MPD refuses to arrest suspect.
NINA MOINI: Minneapolis City Council member Emily Koski, representing Ward 11 in South Minneapolis, was one of a handful of council members to speak out against what she said was inaction on the part of the police department and mayor to prevent the shooting. She's here now to reflect on the situation. Council member, Koski, thank you for being here.
EMILY KOSKI: Thank you for having me.
NINA MOINI: We heard a lot of frustration there from Chief O'Hara. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I see you as a council member who has very often agreed with Mayor Jacob Frey and Chief O'Hara on public safety issues. What led you to speak out about this situation in particular?
EMILY KOSKI: Well, this situation in particular unfortunately came to a head with a tragic incident when Mr. Moturi was shot in front of his home. And the reality of it is our city deserves safety. And it deserves leaders who see this tragic situation and do everything they can to make sure it doesn't happen again.
And I absolutely support police and MPD, and I'm always here to make sure that they know that we are here to help support them. But in this instance, and in the information that you just shared from the chief-- that was on Friday-- I wanted to make sure that Mr. Moturi understood and that we were sorry.
And I heard no apology and no accountability from us in these actions. And so I felt that we had heard only silence from the mayor. We hadn't heard from him in four days after this incident had happened. And that continues to erode trust. When there is an absence of information and an absence of leadership, it erodes trust.
NINA MOINI: So you heard Police Chief O'Hara's comments there. Do you see where he's coming from? Or how do you interpret when he says, damned if they do, damned if they don't? If they'd taken immediate action to arrest the suspect, it would have been an issue. Waiting would have been an issue. What was your thoughts on what he had to say?
EMILY KOSKI: I understand that this is complex. And there are often no easy answers. But in this situation, there had to be somewhere in between doing nothing and an extreme. And I'm grateful to see that last night that happened. We used de-escalation tactics. And the individual was arrested without injury.
NINA MOINI: Yeah. And you also mentioned some council members were frustrated they were not hearing from the mayor. So let's listen to what Mayor Frey did say last night about the situation at a press conference, or rather, early this morning after the arrest.
JACOB FREY: I know there have been several individuals out there, including council members, telling them to immediately barge in, to do this the wrong way. I stand with our police officers.
Doing this the right way takes courage. It takes the willingness to deescalate a tense situation. It takes resources. It takes a whole lot of people that were standing behind me just a few moments ago to make sure that the surrounding neighborhoods are safe.
NINA MOINI: What are your thoughts?
EMILY KOSKI: Well, what I have to say to that is that I, myself, nor did I hear any of my other colleagues suggest or tell the mayor or the chief what to do or say that they wanted them to barge in. What they wanted was our leaders to show up.
And so that wasn't the request. So I'm unclear of what he was necessarily asking for there.
NINA MOINI: From your perspective as a council member, what can you do when a constituent contacts your offices or city staff and says, I feel unsafe? I imagine that's quite frustrating. What can you all actually do at that level?
EMILY KOSKI: We do have-- it's a great question. We do have a plethora of resources. We have our crime prevention specialists. We have 311. We have our officers. We have different navigators within the city that we are potentially working with.
And I think that there was a slew of emails that I'm sure people have seen that Councilmember Jenkins in this situation had tried over and over to do. But oftentimes, we do hit a wall.
And we're doing a lot of connecting. I feel like that's our job. We're advocating for residents. We're making sure that they're getting connected to the resources at the city. But I myself can't actually implement and do anything about what's happening at the back end.
NINA MOINI: O'Hara mentioned as well that his department wasn't just sitting on their hands, that they had tried to make contact with this suspect, John Sawchak, for months but were unable to make contact, saying that they don't really have enough resources to take care of this issue earlier.
What is the council doing to get MPD more resources? Or what did you think about that explanation as well?
EMILY KOSKI: Well, the council last year in the budget we did allocate over 40 new FTEs for the police department this year in the budget presentation. They are requesting an addition to their budget and additional FTEs. I do not see us standing in the way of that.
So the council is doing everything that we can in order to make sure that they have the resources that they need. When we've been asked, we have delivered.
NINA MOINI: Well, I also want to switch gears a little bit while I have you and talk about more violence that we've seen in Minneapolis this past week. There were two separate shootings in or near encampments that led to three people losing their lives.
And this isn't a new issue. There's been back and forth between members of the council, MPD, the mayor's office on how to handle violence like this, how to try to curb violence and bring safety and security to people.
Chief O'Hara and Mayor Frey have said a lot of the problems that happen stem from fentanyl, not as much-- a lack of housing or perhaps many issues together. Can you explain why this is so complicated to figure out at the city level? And what does the council need to make a significant impact here?
EMILY KOSKI: Yeah, this is extremely complex. And it was tragic of what happened just in the course of a few days to lose additional lives and also to continue to have all this violence right within our neighborhoods.
I know that this weighs heavy on my fellow colleagues. But it weighs heavy on our neighbors and our residents because they know that they don't want to see this.
There is a multitude of reasons that this is happening. Fentanyl and addiction is one. A lack of housing is another. And also there are policies that we can put into place. And that's what I'm excited to see as my colleagues continue to move forward.
They are working on policies that will help us think creatively about how we can solve these solutions. We've been sitting on what I would call a little bit of a merry-go-round here and continuing to do the same work over and over.
And I think, as we can see, it's not working. And so my colleagues are going to be bringing forward a few different ordinances to make sure that we can think more creatively, but also organizations can think more creatively.
And I'm looking forward to making sure that we educate and help the community understand what we're going to be doing here.
NINA MOINI: Real quick, what's one of those policies you'd really like to see passed that the council has proposed?
EMILY KOSKI: Yeah. I want us to be thinking about safe outdoor spaces and what does that look like. And from my understanding, the work that they're looking at is one of the issues that we have. And one opportunity that we've noticed has worked is low-barrier shelters.
So take Avivo Village. That's an exceptional example of how we've been able to support individuals who are trying to get out of homelessness. And the reality of it is, though, it's very expensive to build more Avivo Villages. It's very expensive to maintain an Avivo Village.
And so there is work to try to broaden the Avivo Village model. But we might have to think creatively and think about different organizations and neighborhoods that will want to have safe outdoor spaces.
And we want to put forward an ordinance that would allow that to happen. It does not mean that there can be an encampment. It means that an organization has to have a permit. They have to have wraparound services. And so there's a lot that will go into this. But we can't even think about doing this until we're able to pass these types of policies.
NINA MOINI: Councilmember Koski, thank you for your time.
EMILY KOSKI: Thank you. I appreciate it. Have a great day.
NINA MOINI: You, too. That was Minneapolis City Council member Emily Koski who represents Ward 11 in South Central Minneapolis. And we also want to say that we have reached out to Mr. Moturi's family. We have heard that he is out of the hospital but not feeling up to giving interviews at this time. We certainly will check back in if he does want to give his account of what happened to us.
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