Minneapolis, MN
'The epitome of a guardian': Slain Minneapolis officer remembered for courage, empathy
A photo montage preceding Jamal Mitchell’s memorial service flashed through the life of the 36-year-old Minneapolis police officer, killed in the line of duty.
It depicted him doing the things a lot of us do, surrounded by family and friends. Watching a ball game. Playing a board game. Eating a Sweet Martha’s cookie. Holding a baby, asleep on his chest.
Mitchell was on vacation. Celebrating a birthday. He was dressed as Batman and Mr. Incredible. And in his police uniform, reading to kids.
He was a man who sacrificed everything to protect the community. And a man, the images reflected, who spent his life building community, bringing warmth and affection to all those he met.
Minutes earlier, a phalanx of law-enforcement officers dressed in white, black, brown and blue stood in silent attention outside Maple Grove Senior High School as a procession of mounted police escorted the caisson wagon transporting Mitchell’s flag-draped casket. Six officers carried the casket to the front of the gymnasium and placed it next to Mitchell’s beaming portrait and several bouquets. One of the floral arrangements formed a white heart, with a jagged break down its center.
Thousands of law enforcement officers filed in to pay their respects to a fallen colleague killed on May 30 while responding to a shooting in Minneapolis’ Whittier neighborhood. Attendees were there to show support for Mitchell’s family, including his partner and their four children.
Mike Emmert, pastor of Eagle Brook Church in Wayzata, opened the service by encouraging mourners to shed tears of pain and happiness. “Today, it’s good to cry, and today it’s good to laugh and to have some joy, because of the joy that Jamal brought to all of us,” he said.
Emmert asked those assembled to step back from asking the instinctive question of “why?”: Why did this have to happen? Why would God allow this? Instead, he urged focus on questions of “what?”: What should I learn from this? What is God trying to show me? What is God doing with my heart?
“If you ask these questions, you’re gonna find the hope that Jamal had found in his life.”
“This was Jamal’s purpose”
Mitchell’s aunt Denise Raper read the 23rd Psalm and described her nephew’s his life’s work as helping others. “This was Jamal’s purpose,” she said. “To reach down and pick you up.”
Mitchell spent most of his life in New Haven, Conn., before moving to Minnesota about six years ago. He joined the Minneapolis Police Department in 2023 and quickly became known for his exceptional friendliness — waving from his squad car and chatting people up when out on patrol. He was thorough and empathetic, often checking in on crime victims a few days after responding to an incident.
Mitchell’s colleagues said they saw him as sergeant material and wished they could clone him. In his own way, Mitchell was repairing the reputation of the Minneapolis Police Department in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. With each greeting and toothpaste-commercial smile, Mitchell seemed to communicate: I’m a part of this community. And I’m here for you.
On his third day on the job, Mitchell and his partner, Zachery Randall, had their mettle tested when they were the first to arrive on the scene of a fire. Though they lacked protective gear, the two raced inside the burning home and lead an elderly couple to safety. The rookie cop made good on what had drawn him to his new career: the chance to save lives, even as he risked his own.
And when Mitchell did the same, on his final call, he didn’t hesitate. With this act, Raper noted that her nephew did what he set out to do. “Through our tears and heavy heart we collectively say: ‘Mission accomplished.’ “
“The very best of our city”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey eulogized Mitchell, saying that “he exemplified the very best of our city.” Frey poignantly thanked Mitchell on behalf of all Minneapolis residents and visitors for choosing to work in the city, despite its challenges. “We will never forget the sacrifice you made,” he said. “You lived a hero. You died a hero, and you will be remembered as a hero in our city forever.”
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara shared that Mitchell had been posthumously bestowed the two highest honors in the department: the Medal of Honor and Purple Heart. He called Mitchell “deeply committed” to the police officer’s mission to protect and serve. O’Hara said Mitchell represented “all that is good about the men and women of the Minneapolis Police Department and police officers around this state and this country.”
O’Hara said functioning democracies need guardians, and “Jamal was the epitome of a guardian of our community. Jamal was courageous to his very core. He was empathetic and deeply committed to the cause and mission of police officers in our country. He was heroic as a man until the very end.”
Two of Mitchell’s friends introduced themselves with nicknames he’d given them. Minneapolis police officer Luke Weatherspoon, who went through the academy with Mitchell, was “Dookie Lukey.” Mitchell’s neighbor Chris Dunker was “Slam Dunk.” Both shared stories of Mitchell’s selflessness including, how, the day before his death, Mitchell had jumped into a pool to grab a kid struggling in the water without pausing to slip off his prized Nikes. (Mitchell’s family, and even Emmert, were wearing Nikes in honor of the beloved sneakerhead.)
Weatherspoon and Dunker noted how Mitchell spent hours volunteering, coaching basketball and playing with his kids in the yard. How he was so energetic and inclusive. Dunker shared that another neighbor had said that if someone were to offer him $1 million to say one bad thing about Mitchell, he simply wouldn’t be able to do it.
“What does that say about his character and reputation? It tells me he is exactly the officer we need more of in our community,” he said.
Dunker then spoke directly to his friend: “I’ll miss your bigger-than-life personality. But know this: At least twice a day every day, every day, I’ll be thinking of you and that big, bright Colgate smile.” Dunker then pulled a tube of toothpaste out of his suit jacket, stirring a laugh from the crowd.
Emmert gave the closing prayer and thanked God for “how you take something that is evil and turn it into something that is good.” The color guard escorted the flags out before Mitchell’s family exited, followed by Gov. Tim Walz. The crowd departed, many clutching blue-and-white roses, as bagpipers played.
Outside, a rifle volley was fired in salute and a single helicopter flew overhead. A final call was issued for officer Jamal Mitchell, badge 4819.
“The community supports them”
At the start of the processional, fire trucks blocked the road. A giant American flag hung between the truck’s extended ladders and their crews saluted the stream of vehicles headed to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Mitchell’s body will be flown back to his native Connecticut for a service and burial.
Dean Scheidler, a retired FBI special agent who was with the bureau for 31 years, stood outside the service near fire trucks holding an American flag. He was there in solidarity and support.
“The circumstances of his killing, the way he lived his life, it’s not overstated to use the word ‘hero,’ ” he said, adding that he is a “firm believer that the profession has been done a disservice” by community members and council members who call for defunding police.
“I feel like the police need to have more advocates. They need to be stronger advocates for themselves, and they need community leaders and the public to be stronger advocates for them. You only see it when there’s a funeral … and it needs to happen all the time, every day in every interaction. The police have to earn that respect in the way they deal with people, but we have to give them the benefit of the doubt.”
On the I-94 overpass at Weaver Lake Road, Kris Foley and daughters, Erin, 8, and Cara, 6, waved flags as they waited for the procession to start. “Our dad is a police officer,” said Erin Foley, adding that she and her sister go to school with Mitchell’s children. Their dad, a Robbinsdale officer, was among those from neighboring agencies patrolling Minneapolis so MPD officers could attend the funeral, Kris Foley said.
Greg Anzelc of Maple Grove attached two flags to the overpass fence and said the death of an officer from the community hit home. “We’re all here to show the family and all first responders that the community supports them, the state supports them.”
As the processional made its 30-mile journey, those along the roadside met the always-waving officer with gestures of respect and love: Two friends embraced and raised their hands, firefighters saluted, and a woman shaped her fingers into a heart and held it to the heavens.
Editor’s Note: Max Hailperin is walking each of Minneapolis’ 87 neighborhoods, in alphabetical order. He chronicles his adventures at allofminneapolis.com, where the original version of this article was published July 4, 2026.
The Northeast Park neighborhood is arguably the northeasternmost in Minneapolis. Those that extend somewhat further east are nowhere near as far north, and those that are further north don’t extend as far to the east. Of course, everyone’s entitled to their own opinion. I’m not trying to pick a fight with Waite Park, for example.
What’s inarguable is that the neighborhood divides into two quite distinct areas. West of Johnson Street, there’s a nearly square portion, bounded on its other three sides by Broadway Street, Central Avenue, and 18th Avenue. (I’ll omit the direction indicator NE, which applies to all streets and avenues in this area.) This western portion was the focus for this first walk in the neighborhood. Unlike the irregularly shaped area east of Johnson, it has a grid-based layout, albeit with substantial gaps.
The main loop of my walk began and ended at the southwest corner, the intersection of Broadway and Central. The building on that corner, The Broadway, presents a low-profile facade toward Broadway, which is the uphill side of a sloping lot. The main tenant on this side is Spyhouse Coffee, which makes the most of the timber and brick interior. I chose to wait until the end of the walk to see other parts of the building.
Heading east on Broadway, the next building I passed was the National Guard armory, described more fully by the sign out front as the “Minnesota Army National Guard N.E. Minneapolis Training and Community Center.” A sprawling one-story structure built in 1992, it has none of the romance of the earlier castle-like armories or the vaulted art deco structure in downtown Minneapolis. Together with its parking lot, it occupies the entire triple-sized block from Tyler to Fillmore, with Polk and Taylor being absent in this area.
East of Fillmore, I continued in a forward-and-back spur two blocks to Buchanan, with a side spur north on Pierce. This reflects the fact that Pierce doesn’t cross the diagonal railroad tracks, one of the many ways in which the street grid of this area gives way to the realities of land use.
I rather like how commercial, residential and recreational uses are mixed together, leading to buildings of widely varying age, style, and size. Some of them have also gained a new look and new purpose over time. For example, a concrete-block building on the corner of Broadway and Pierce, which looks like it started life as an automotive business in the 1970s, now has a sharp paint job and signage announcing its repurposing as Abra Kadabra Environmental Services: “When nature creeps in, call us.”
An even more striking example lies in the first block north of Broadway on Fillmore, a house now prominently exhibiting mural art by Yuya Negishi, but upon closer examination showing signs of its origins as the Samuel Moyer Gospel Lighthouse.
Take another look again at that mural-adorned former chapel, this time with an eye toward how its form fits that of its neighbors. To its right and further to its left, there are houses with similarly pitched roofs. But this appearance of consistency is somewhat illusory. The neighbor immediately to the left (or north) only came into view as I walked a bit further.
That immediate neighbor, a flat-roofed two-story structure, was built in 1901 as an apartment building. Today its four rental units are guarded by three metal roosters.
All of these residence are directly across Fillmore from the United States Postal Service’s Vehicle Maintenance Facility, just north of the armory. At the time of my walk, its lot was packed full of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles, which I assume were being readied for their initial deployment.
I walked 13th Avenue east from Fillmore to its dead end just beyond Lincoln Street, where Interstate 35W cuts through. So far as getting anywhere goes, I was wasting my time to go that extra half block beyond Lincoln. But the whole point of this project isn’t to get anywhere, it’s to see what there is to see. And you never know when you’re going to see a giraffe in someone’s back yard.
A few roosters or a giraffe are nothing compared to the lawn ornaments on one of the Lincoln Street houses just south of 12th Avenue. The horizontal lines of flower boxes and whatnot balance out the vertical totem-pole-like collection of cartoon characters (Minnie Mouse, a pig chef, baby Yoda, a cow and I don’t know what else).
With that behind me, you’ll understand why, after wrapping around to Buchanan Street, I was unsure about the turkey resting on a loading dock. Was it like the metal roosters, the giraffe, the pig? I waited. Eventually it swiveled its head, answering my question in the negative.
The very presence of a loading dock amidst residences is not something one would see in more rigidly zoned neighborhoods. The residences vary in age, with my eye particularly drawn to one a couple blocks further north that turns out to be from 1902.
The street grid is interrupted again at 14th Avenue, this time by Northeast Athletic Field Park, the defining feature of the neighborhood. I walked a spur east along 14th Avenue as far as Johnson Street, then turned west to continue my main loop. The athletic fields themselves are just athletic fields, nothing that struck me as out of the ordinary. (I’m notably non-athletic.) But the restroom building in the block between Buchanan and Pierce is a standout for its Creatives after Curfew mural celebrating “the heart of Northeast Park.” It was painted in 2021 by Leslie Barlow, Maiya Lea Hartman, Thomasina Topbear, Maria Robinson and Claudia Valentino, sponsored by the Northeast Park Neighborhood Association.
Once I was headed back northbound on Fillmore, I detoured off to the west on the entrance driveway leading to Sociable Cider Werks. For a pedestrian, it’s actually easier to access this business from the north, but I wasn’t sure yet whether that was blocked off or not, so I took the driveway. I enjoyed a brief rest stop on their patio, consuming a Freewheeler cider and an oil-stained paper bag of seasoned french fries from the resident food trailer, Smashed Patty’s.
The All of Minneapolis project has been an on-and-off part of my life for a decade now, and though there has been change over that time, there have also been constants. One of those constants has been my struggle with how to balance the interesting and the beautiful in my choice of photo subjects.
North of the park on Fillmore, there are two quite similar buildings, each built in the late 19th century by Aaron Carlson as a duplex and then extended by him in the 1920s and subdivided. I decided to photograph the slightly older of the two (1897 versus 1899), even though I can’t count the obscuring of the original facade in the category of beauties. It simply is too interesting a glimpse into the evolution of this Minneapolis housing to be ignored. And that’s even before the name “Aaron Carlson” meant anything to me. (Later in the walk I saw the name on a smokestack and looked it up.)
As I walked by other residential properties, mostly from varying decades of the 20th century, I was frequently as interested by the flowering bushes and trees as by the buildings. Likewise, when I came around to the Johnson Street side of the park, I was as drawn to the daffodils planted around the sign as I was by the water park visible in the background.
After following 16th Avenue along the northern border of the park, I turned north on Buchanan Street and found myself walking alongside a school building for which the playground equipment already signaled that it wasn’t just any school. Yinghua Academy is a Mandarin Chinese immersion school.
Before I turned onto 17th Avenue and saw the front of the school (complete with a fitting Little Free Library), I paused to consider the white duplex at 1709 Buchanan. The horizontal lines and white color made me think of one of the less common styles of modernist architecture, loosely inspired by the Secession Building in Vienna. I don’t know whether that was intentional; the history of the building’s construction and expansion is complex.
Once I was back to 18th Avenue, I headed west from Pierce Street to Central Avenue, with southward spurs down Taylor, Polk and Tyler Streets. This is a rhododendron-enhanced residential area dead ending at the railroad-adjacent industrial zone that now contains Sociable Cider Werks and the former Industrial Machinery Company building, fancifully called “The Alamo.” I saw the front of that building once I turned onto Central Avenue.
To access the part of this industrial area that is south of the tracks, I turned east on 14th Avenue. Extending south of there on Tyler Street is the former Crown Iron Works, redeveloped by Hillcrest Development. Today it is the Crown-Arts Center, billed as a “Creative Office Campus.” Sadly, one of the tenants I visited, Bauhaus Brew Labs, has closed in the interval between my walk and completing this writeup.
Tyler Street also brought me back to The Broadway building, where I had begun my walk. Across the parking lot from it is a 2023 apartment building featuring a mural by Chuck U. The parking lot also provides a good view of the historical signage (“The Land-O-Nod Co., Bedding Manufacturers”) and is the site for a sculpture by Zoran Mojsilov.)
The parking lot also provides access to the side of the building opposite Tyler Street, where there is a sheltered area between the building itself and the retaining wall of Central Avenue, which ascends to Broadway. That area contains a stone amphitheater and a patio served by Padraigs Brewing. There I capped my walk off with an N.E. Porter and a Potter’s Pasty.
All photos by Max Hailperin
Related
MINNESOTA (TNND) — Federal prosecutors have turned over key evidence in the fatal ICE shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti to Minnesota investigators after months of legal battles, marking a major breakthrough in the state’s effort to investigate the deaths.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty announced Monday that the evidence was released by U.S. Attorney for Minnesota Daniel Rosen’s office after a lengthy dispute over access to the materials. The transfer includes previously withheld hard drives containing witness statements, police body-camera footage and Good’s damaged SUV.
“The wonderful thing now is we have all the evidence,” Moriarty said in a video statement. “Any time the government is responsible in whatever way for taking the life of a community member, we need to have a full and thorough investigation.”
The Minneapolis immigration crackdown, dubbed “Operation Metro Surge,” ended in February after being billed as the largest immigration enforcement operation ever.
A private autopsy found that Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot three times by a federal immigration agent during a Jan. 7 traffic stop, including a fatal gunshot wound to the head.
Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, was shot and killed during a Jan. 24 protest. The medical examiner ruled he died after being struck multiple times by federal agents.
At least nine people have been killed nationwide in encounters involving ICE agents since the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign began last year. No one has been charged in connection with the deaths, and the federal government has argued that state prosecutors lack jurisdiction to investigate federal officers.
The latest development also comes as questions continue to surround other recent fatal ICE shootings. An ICE agent fatally shot a motorist in Maine on Monday, while prosecutors in Houston said federal officials are still withholding key evidence in their investigation into another deadly shooting involving an ICE officer last week.
New video of Minneapolis ICE shooting from agent’s perspective (CNN Newsource)
Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration in March, accusing federal authorities of refusing to provide evidence needed for the state investigation.
Court filings suggest the breakthrough came after federal prosecutors sought evidence gathered by state investigators in a separate case involving ICE agent Christian Castro.
Castro, 52, has been charged with assault and falsely reporting a crime in connection with the Jan. 14 nonfatal shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Prosecutors allege Castro fired through the front door of a Minneapolis home while pursuing another man, striking Sosa-Celis in the thigh.
State and local prosecutors told federal officials they would share evidence in Castro’s case only if the federal government agreed to reciprocate in the investigations into the deaths of Good and Pretti.
“We are willing to share evidence with you if the exchange is reciprocal,” Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans wrote in a court filing.
Lawyers for Good’s family called the evidence transfer “an important and meaningful step toward justice and accountability.” The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, which has taken custody of the materials, said “great strides have been made” to ensure a “thorough and complete review” of both shootings.
But an attorney for Pretti’s family said Rosen’s office still declined during a Monday meeting to confirm whether any formal cooperation agreement exists between state and federal investigators.
“No family should be required to beg federal authorities to do their job,” attorney Steve Schleicher said in a statement. “Without a public commitment by federal authorities to cooperate with the state, it is difficult—if not impossible—to pursue justice that holds the individuals accountable for Alex’s death.”
The evidence transfer marks the first significant cooperation between state and federal investigators since Minnesota filed its lawsuit, potentially allowing the long-stalled investigations into both fatal shootings to move forward.
_____
Editor’s note: The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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