- The family of
Amir Locke plans to file a wrongful death lawsuit against theMinneapolis Police Department, their lawyer said. - "We feel that excessive force killed Amir Locke," civil rights attorney Ben Crump told Insider.
The family of Amir Locke, the young Black man fatally shot by Minneapolis police carrying out a no-knock warrant earlier this month, is poised to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the city's police department for the killing, the family's attorney told Insider on Tuesday.
"We anticipate a lawsuit being filed" for the February 2 death of 22-year-old Locke, said civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Locke's family.
"We feel that excessive force killed Amir Locke," Crump said, adding that the SWAT team officers who executed the raid at a downtown Minneapolis apartment building "just entered that house without giving [Locke] any warning" as he slept.
Crump said he believes the Minneapolis Police Department, as well as the city of Minneapolis, is at fault for Locke's death.
"We think the no-knock warrant policy killed him more drastically than the bullets from the police officer's gun," said Crump. "If they did not have this policy then Amir would be living today."
Locke was shot to death as a team carried out the no-knock warrant as part of a St. Paul, Minnesota homicide investigation.
Police have said that Locke was not named in the no-knock warrant.
Graphic footage of the incident from a police body-worn camera shows Locke under a blanket on the couch when police stormed into the home just before 7 a.m.
Locke can be seen in video footage on the couch with a pistol in his hand moments before he was shot dead.
Locke's family said he was a legal gun owner.
"Just like any American citizen, he has a right to the Second Amendment," Crump said. "Black people have rights to the Second Amendment."
Crump said Locke, an aspiring hip-hop artist, was a driver for the food delivery company DoorDash and owned a gun "for safety."
"He talked to both his mother and father before he got the gun," Crump said, adding that Locke "researched it, he did everything that a responsible citizen would do to exercise their Second Amendment rights."
"When these police officers broke into the home while he was asleep, in a dead sleep," Crump said, Locke reacted "as any reasonable law-abiding gun owner would have."
The use of no-knock warrants have come under fire in recent years, especially after the death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman who was killed during a no-knock police raid in 2020 in Kentucky.
Several cities have banned no-knock warrants and Minneapolis restricted the use of the controversial practice in 2020.