Justine Damond's faraway death from gunfire has stoked fears about American police shootings in Australia, where such encounters are rare.
Thousands of miles from the Minneapolis neighborhood where his daughter died, John Ruszczyk stood near his family home in Sydney, Australia, on Tuesday and spoke to reporters about a desire for justice.
"Justine was a beacon to all of us," Ruszczyk said in a statement to media. "We only ask that the light of justice shine down on the circumstances of her death."
Justine Damond, also known as Justine Ruszczyk, died late Saturday after being shot by a police officer responding to her 911 call. News of her death has flooded Australian airwaves, newspapers and websites for days, as headlines highlight unanswered questions over the officer's use of deadly force. That country has tough gun ownership laws and a government travel website that even warns about U.S. gun crimes.
"We see America as a very risky place in terms of gun violence — and so does the rest of the world," said Philip Alpers, a gun policy analyst with the University of Sydney.
Only a handful of deadly police-involved shootings are reported in Australia each year, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology. And though the U.S. doesn't keep a national database of such shootings, even incomplete statistics show there are hundreds annually.
A recent Australian headline in the Daily Telegraph newspaper described Damond's death as an "American Nightmare," a sentiment echoed by her father Tuesday.
"We thought yesterday was our worst nightmare," Ruszczyk said in the family's statement. "But we awoke to the ugly truth and it hurt even more."
