Before shooting, John Sawchak terrorized south Minneapolis neighbors for more than 15 years

John Sawchak had become the man to avoid. Fellow residents in his south Minneapolis neighborhood often took alternate routes to bypass his alley — and avoid a potential confrontation.

The 54-year-old with a history of mental illness developed a reputation for erratic, sometimes violent behavior with those on or near his block. People of color were frequent targets.

Long before Sawchak shot and seriously wounded his next-door neighbor Davis Moturi last week — despite myriad warnings to police and others that he was dangerous — Sawchak terrorized and at times physically assaulted residents of the quiet Lyndale neighborhood, court documents and interviews revealed.

Police reports and reams of restraining orders concerning Sawchak date back nearly two decades. A Black family says Sawchak’s constant torment ran them out of the same house Moturi now owns. A 77-year-old neighbor recalled Sawchak chasing her down with a large stick, causing her to fall while she was walking her dog. Former tenants in his fourplex endured threats and intimidation, including one incident when Sawchak left spent ammunition outside a tenant’s door.

And then there was Moturi, 34, who called police nearly 30 times, and filed a harassment restraining order before Sawchak allegedly shot Moturi in the neck on Oct. 23 in broad daylight as he trimmed a tree near their property line. The bullet fractured his spine and broke two ribs.

Sawchak was arrested four days later, after a SWAT team breached his home with heavy machinery during a late-night operation.

Amid widespread criticism about the delayed response, Police Chief Brian O’Hara defended the department’s decision not to execute a “high-risk warrant” on an armed recluse where officers might have needed to resort to deadly force. He preferred to wait until Sawchak left the residence, so officers surveilled the home for days. But Sawchak did not emerge until after a five-hour standoff.

Since 2007, Sawchak has been a party to 10 court petitions seeking an order for protection based on allegations of harassment, stalking, window-peeping and various forms of assault culminating in last week’s shooting.

The previous claims prompted at least five criminal complaints, starting in 2016, outlining increasingly threatening and violent behavior in the Lyndale neighborhood. He’s been convicted once so far — for slashing the tires of a Minneapolis police officer.

Sawchak remains jailed on attempted murder charges and three lesser criminal counts in the Moturi case. During his first court appearance, where bail was set at $1 million or $600,000 with conditions, Sawchak demanded to know when he would be allowed to obtain a restraining order against the people he is accused of victimizing.

His public defender, Elizabeth Karp, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

His legal problems began snowballing in 2007, when Sawchak sued his younger sister. He claimed among other things that she was entering his Grand Avenue apartment while he was away, making harassing phone calls, stealing items and even conspiring with her husband to kill him.

Judge Patricia Belois quickly dismissed the petition, reasoning that the sibling was never seen doing what Sawchak claimed.

Hennepin County records show Sawchak has owned the fourplex at 3527 Grand Av. S. since 1992 — although he is currently delinquent on nearly $33,000 in property taxes. At least two tenants have sought court intervention following months of reported harassment. Both described constant screaming and pounding on the walls. A female resident recalled Sawchak once blocking her from leaving the premises while demanding the rent be paid.

“I was afraid that if I tried to get by him, he was going to use physical force to restrain me,” the woman wrote in her 2011 petition for a restraining order. “Finally, I ran out the back door of the building.”

The mother of three young children who lived next door in the home now owned by Moturi also secured an order for protection later that year after telling the court of a litany of distressing actions by Sawchak: cutting the family’s cable TV cord, video-recording their movements, peeping in the bathroom window at night, and making numerous false reports to police about loud music, trespassing and trying to burn down the building. In one case, Sawchak called 911 to claim the family was “cooking drugs” when they were actually baking a cake, records show.

“We don’t have peace,” the woman, a Liberian immigrant, wrote in court filings. “We are afraid that he might go as far as harming the kids.”

Sawchak’s actions only escalated, she wrote, making her children afraid to sleep in their own rooms, walk to the bus stop or play in the backyard.

In 2015, shortly after the previous protection order expired, the mother was granted a second restraining order because Sawchak allegedly refused to relent. His harassment campaign resumed and included slicing open a screen window, screaming at her son while he was in the shower and banging on the door at all hours. He repeatedly demanded that they move.

Sawchak kept a handgun visible in the second-story window to intimidate the family, she said, occasionally flashing it at them.

Police encouraged her to keep reporting the incidents but, she says, authorities never did anything once they arrived, because Sawchak always retreated inside his home. Sometimes, police dismissed her claims, saying she had no proof. A female officer once told her: “Ma’am, if you don’t feel safe, it’s better for you to move.”

Eventually, they did — borrowing money from her 401k account out of desperation to rent the family a much smaller apartment.

“The system failed us,” she said when reached by phone this week. The Star Tribune agreed not to identify her because she has continued fears for her safety. “We could have been the ones dead by now.”

Carole Megarry, a neighbor on Pleasant Avenue, has shared an alley with Sawchak for more than 30 years. Their relationship soured nearly a decade ago when Sawchak became irate about her dog getting in his yard, or relieving itself in an adjacent parking lot.

“Any kind of intrusion was not welcome to him,” Megarry, 77, told the Star Tribune. From then on she made sure her dog stayed clear of his property. But she said Sawchak soon began to follow, berate and video record her as she walked the dog outside, including one Easter morning. That prompted Megarry to file an order for protection in 2016.

She pursued a second restraining order two years ago, when Sawchak became violent. As Megarry walked her dog, Sawchak came running after her with a 4-foot piece of lumber and yelled, “Get your dog off my property!” according to court records. He swung it down on her left shoulder, delivering a blow that threw her to the ground, knocking off her glasses.

She gashed her hand on the pavement. Sawchak was charged with misdemeanor assault and disorderly conduct. But he never appeared in court.

This complaint spawned the first of three arrest warrants that remained in place until Sawchak finally surrendered to police on Monday.

The ordeal left Megarry looking over her shoulder for years. She and her longtime partner, Michael Lander, took steps to avoid the shared alley, but Sawchak still found ways to seek them out. At least once, members of the nearby community garden physically removed Sawchak after he stormed in screaming at Lander as he worked in the dirt.

Despite repeated interactions with law enforcement in recent years, Sawchak has been held criminally liable only once.

A 2016 altercation with a Minneapolis police officer, in which he slashed the squad car’s tires with a knife and refused to drop the weapon, was followed by a nearly six-month civil commitment to a mental health treatment center.

The doctor’s examination determined that Sawchak was suffering from a host of psychological illnesses, among them paranoia, bipolar and delusional disorders that left him posing “a substantial likelihood of causing harm,” according to court records.

Sawchak was charged with second-degree assault in connection with that encounter, but a judge found him incompetent to stand trial. He ended up pleading guilty to obstructing police, a gross misdemeanor. The civil commitment ended in January 2017 and he was released. Under state law, because of his commitment, he was barred from possessing a firearm.

Problems began almost immediately after Davis and Caroline Moturi moved in next door to Sawchak last fall. Over the course of a year, the couple would call police at least 29 times to report instances of vandalism, property destruction, theft, harassment, hate speech and other verbal — sometimes overtly racist — threats.

“We are living in constant fear of John,” Davis Moturi, who is Black, wrote in a petition for a restraining order granted by a judge in April. The document outlined aggressive behavior by Sawchak that ranged from attacking Moturi with a bladed garden tool as he installed a security camera on the house to dumping human waste down the couple’s mail slot to taking pictures of them in the middle of the night. “It is clear that incarceration is the only thing that will stop John.”

Davis Moturi once managed to physically restrain Sawchak following an April 8 altercation, hoping police would arrest him.

In a video captured by a neighbor, Moturi is seen on top of a barefoot Sawchak in Sawchak’s yard strewn with patio chairs and a walker.

“You’re always [expletive] with my property!” Sawchak yells.

“You’re wanted by the cops,” Moturi responds, telling bystanders that “this guy assaulted me and my wife, he went on my property …”

“You came on my property first!” Sawchak argues. “ … you love picking on an old handicapped man.”

“You’re getting arrested,” Moturi responds, suddenly cocking his fist, saying that if Sawchak spits on him again, “I’ll [expletive] you up.” Moturi is not seen hitting Sawchak in the video.

Sawchak continues yelling as Moturi explains to the neighbors that Sawchak has been the subject of an arrest warrant for more than a year. The video cuts off before police arrive.

MPD arrived to find Moturi still restraining Sawchak, who appeared to be bleeding from the face, a police spokesman told the Minnesota Star Tribune. Officers separated them and, as they worked to untangle what happened, Sawchak retreated back into his home, declining medical treatment.

Asked why he wasn’t immediately taken into custody, Sgt. Garrett Parten said that officers were not aware that Sawchak had a pending misdemeanor warrant until after he went inside.

A few days later, Sawchak was charged with causing substantial emotional distress, a gross misdemeanor. The criminal complaint alleged that Sawchak told Davis Moturi that the neighborhood had become a ghetto since he moved in, called him a monkey and told him to “go back to north Minneapolis.”

In July, Sawchak was charged with threats of violence — his first felony — after leaving feces in the Moturis’ yard and threatening him with a 6-inch knife, announcing: “I should have killed you last night.”

He managed to continue evading law enforcement.

In the months that followed, the Moturis continued reporting Sawchak’s repeated threats, including an October incident where Sawchak allegedly pointed a firearm at Davis Moturi. The Moturis pleaded for police intervention, once writing in an email to a host of elected officials: “We are living in hell.”

An officer who responded to one of their numerous 911 calls encouraged them to “just move out,” Caroline Moturi wrote in the online fundraiser launched to pay for medical bills after her husband was shot.

Police said they had been working to detain Sawchak since April, but regular surveillance outside his house never led to in-person contact. Residents question how a dangerous man could be wanted by authorities for so long and avoid accountability by simply refusing to answer the door.

“If there’s a weapons call, why are they just waiting outside?” said Nadia Hecker-O’Brien, a psychotherapist who lives a few houses down.

O’Hara pushed back on allegations that his officers didn’t care or failed to act in this case when, he said, dozens of attempts had been made to safely arrest Sawchak. But days after a defiant news conference, he admitted that the police force had in fact failed Moturi.

Neighbors expressed disappointment with how the whole saga was handled.

“My hope is that our [police department] gets a lot better at taking these things seriously,” Megarry, the retired attorney targeted by Sawchak, said in an interview. “God help you if you have a mentally ill neighbor.”

Staff writers Jeff Day, Deena Winter and Abby Simons contributed to this report.