Burnsville man avoids prison time after helping gunman flee Mall of America

A 23-year-old Burnsville man will not serve time in prison after helping a friend who fired a gun in the Mall of America last summer flee.

Rashad Jamal May, 23, pleaded guilty to aiding an offender earlier this month and was sentenced Tuesday to 77 days in the Hennepin County workhouse with a one-year prison sentence suspended for a year. He will be released for work and the college classes he is taking, and will be on probation for two years. A second-degree assault charge against him was dropped as part of the plea agreement.

"You've got a lot of good things going for you," Judge William H. Koch told May in court, as May's family looked on and his tiny son squirmed in a baby carrier.

Defense attorney Lee Wolfgram played surveillance video showing May and a friend were attacked while shopping at the Mall of America last summer, waiting to make a purchase when they were jumped by a group of five other men. They ran out of the store. May's friend, Shamar Alon Ramon Lark, shot three "warning shots" back into the store moments later, as Wolfgram said the other men were running after them. No one was hurt. Lark has since pleaded guilty to second-degree assault.

May called a friend to pick them up from the mall, Wolfgram said in court, to get away from their attackers — not to run from police.

"He did the wrong thing because he was in fight-or-flight mode," Wolfgram said.

In court, May said the same group had attacked him repeatedly over months, and he still feared for his life. He felt he would need to leave Minnesota to be safe.

Wolfgram castigated the prosecutor and Bloomington Police Department for failing to figure out who attacked May and Lark at the mall last summer. Bloomington Police Chief Booker Hodges held a news conference to announce the arrest of three people who helped Lark and May get away from the mall and called for the men to turn themselves in — even as, Wolfgram said, May was already talking with him to arrange to turn himself in after fleeing to Chicago.

"This was two-sevenths investigation," Wolfgram said, since seven people were involved in the altercation at the mall, and only two have been arrested.

Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Natasha Yenina said in court that Lark and May did not tell police who attacked them.

After May entered his guilty plea earlier this month, Hodges, the Bloomington police chief, said that claims of self-defense are "preposterous."

"He lost a fight and he pulled out a gun," Hodges said in an interview at the time.