By Liz Sawyer
Star Tribune
MINNEAPOLIS — Bullets rang out while she was in the bathroom. The caller emerged to find a horrific sight: two men mortally wounded inside the south Minneapolis apartment. Her partner lay bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head and was barely breathing.
She hid, fearing the shooter would return for her.
“My boyfriend has been killed inside this house. I need you to hurry up … and save him,” she told the 911 operator.
Newly released transcripts offer a real-time window into the frantic and chaotic moments before officers arrived at the scattered scene of a mass shooting in Whittier on May 30 that killed four people, including Minneapolis police officer Jamal Mitchell, and injured three others.
The transcripts include dozens of panicked emergency calls from bystanders, witnesses and victims who watched the mayhem unfold on a busy Blaisdell Avenue street last month. They include accounts from a motorist who admits to ramming the suspected gunman as he attempted to rob a man of his scooter, an innocent driver shot while passing through the intersection with his toddler in the car, and a former police captain desperate for help evacuating his children from a nearby apartment building.
The initial 911 call came in around 5:15 p.m., when the unidentified woman pleaded with dispatchers to send help after discovering her 36-year-old boyfriend unresponsive with obvious head trauma. Another man lay dead in the kitchen.
“Okay, did you see who did it?” the dispatcher asked.
“No, can you just please hurry?” the woman begs. She inquires about how to treat the wound — and whether she should move his body.
The dispatcher instructs the woman to stay by his side and remain on the phone.
“He’s all I have,” she later says, sobbing. “Please.”
That man, Mohamed Bashir Aden, died at the hospital eight days later. Osman Said Jimale, 32, died at the scene. It’s still not clear what led up to the rampage, which spilled outside and down the block.
Officer Mitchell never made it to the apartment. He stopped his squad car just over a block away, rushing to render aid to two wounded men in the street.
The first man he approached ambushed and killed him, firing several shots at close range. Responding officers soon killed that suspect — later identified as 35-year-old Mustafa Ahmed Mohamed — during an exchange of gunfire.
In the moments proceeding the officers’ arrival, Mohamed apparently attempted to steal a random man’s electric scooter. A passing Subaru driver reported intentionally ramming Mohamed, likely breaking his leg, before fleeing the scene.
“I just hit a guy with my car that I saw assaulting and robbing a man, um on Nicollet and um he was, he tried to jump onto this guy’s scooter and I hit him with my car,” he told dispatch.
“I believe he started shooting,” he continued. “I, I, I saw him reach into his pocket and then I heard pop and I urn, I, I drove away.”
Multiple witnesses described seeing Mohamed, lying in the street, fire upon several passing motorists, including a man who had his 2-year-old son in the backseat. That driver, identified by the Star Tribune as Alexander G. Hage , 38, had pulled over to dial 911 after seeing Mohamed bleeding in the roadway and crying out for help, his family confirmed. That’s when he was suddenly struck.
“I got shot. I need help,” Hage repeated to dispatchers twice, as gunfire continued to ring out in the background. He could not say where he’d been hit. The child was physically unharmed.
A firefighter and a second police officer were also wounded during the back-to-back shootings that day.
Minnesota law requires that police agencies release body camera footage within 14 days of a deadly encounter, unless doing so would interfere with an ongoing investigation.
Chief Brian O’Hara issued a statement saying that he has agreed to temporarily withhold body camera footage from the incident at the request of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) because “releasing it may interfere with its investigation.” He did not elaborate on why that might be, given that the suspect is deceased.
“I pledge the MPD’s full cooperation with the BCA’s investigation, and I don’t anticipate a significant delay in the public release of the body-worn camera video,” he said.
A BCA spokeswoman clarified Tuesday that the requested delay was in connection with the double homicide inside the apartment.
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