Crookston reels from back-to-back fatal police shootings

CROOKSTON, MINN. – Not again.

That was Crookston Mayor Dale Stainbrook’s reaction to a second fatal police shooting in this college town and farming community of 7,300 people just 45 days after an officer shot and killed another civilian.

“You just don’t see that here and I think we’re all trying to come to terms with it,” Stainbrook said.

Within a matter of weeks, Crookston joined rare company. It’s among 36 other Minnesota cities with two or more fatal police shootings since 2000, according to a Star Tribune database. Those include cities like Duluth, Rochester, Minneapolis, St. Paul and Twin Cities suburbs. Few small towns have had two or more police-involved shootings in the past quarter century.

Even more rare is that both Crookston shootings were at the hands of the same officer: Nick Fladland, 31, who has five years of law enforcement experience. Fladland is on paid leave for an unspecified time. Chief Darin Selzler said that Fladland’s previous leave following the May 16 shooting was 16 days.

On June 30, Fladland shot and killed a California man, Christopher Ryan Junkin, 44, in Crookston’s homeless shelter that remains closed as staff recovers from the tragedy. Junkin’s family said he was unarmed, naked and having a mental health crisis.

Andrew Scott Dale, 35, of Crookston, was wielding a hatchet when Fladland shot him on a residential street six weeks earlier.

“The fact that it’s the same officer in such a short period of time, and the fact that [Junkin] didn’t have a weapon, you know, that’s deeply concerning from a PTSD standpoint,” said Deb LaCroix-Kinniry, a mental health advocate working with Communities United Against Police Brutality, a police watchdog group.

A 73-year-old woman who placed the 911 call on May 16 and ducked for cover on her front porch when police shot Dale in her neighborhood said the back-to-back shootings are deeply personal.

She lives with a relative who has oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and tends to have outbursts with his episodes. Several times she has had to call police, but said responding officers were excellent. She worries, though, what might happen the next call and has considered moving out of Crookston after just moving here in October from the East Coast.

”They had a community liaison officer. She accompanied each call,” she said. “I really believe they they need something like that here.”

The woman didn’t want to be named out of fear of retaliation in the event that officers respond to her home again. She said her relative with ODD is “seeing people that have the same kind of meltdowns that he has, that he can’t control, that he doesn’t remember half the time when it’s over, and wondering, ‘what’s going to happen if ... you have to call police to help calm me down?’ That’s a big fear in our house right now.”

On Friday afternoon, downtown Crookston streets were hot and bare. Residents who were asked about the shootings declined to comment or said they didn’t know enough about the situation.

One man leaving the library said his son-in-law, a police officer in Minot, N.D., always says that if people follow commands, no one gets hurt. The man, who declined to provide his name, said that he sees officers killed in the line of duty, like Fargo officer Jake Ryan Wallin, 23, killed a year ago Sunday. A memorial ceremony is being held that day at Fargo City Hall to honor Wallin.

Crookston’s deadly shootings raise questions about the mental health of officers and citizens, especially those in crisis. But LaCroix-Kinniry noted that Minnesota passed Travis’ Law in 2021, which requires a referral to mental health crisis teams “when appropriate.” The wording of the statute left it open to interpretation, but sponsors of the measure said the intent of the law is to end police-only responses.

Travis Jordan, 36, was threatening suicide and talking about getting a gun in 2018 when a friend called 911. Minneapolis police told him to drop a knife, but Jordan moved toward an officer and shots were fired.

LaCroix-Kinniry said that, post-Travis’ Law, “we’ve had a number of deaths with people that have mental health issues where Travis’ law was not followed. So there are some serious concerns around that.”

Every county has access to mobile crisis teams through a Minnesota Department of Human Services program.

Chief Selzler would not say if a crisis worker responded to the incidents that led to the Crookston shootings. The 911 call at the homeless shelter was reported as a fight, but Junkin’s roommate at the shelter said Junkin was in crisis. The BCA says Junkin was combative and ignored commands before Fladland fired.

Stainbrook said he doesn’t know Fladland personally. “We’ve got a lot of new officers in Crookston,” he said.

He said that prior to a pay raise a few budget cycles ago, the department was “kind of a training ground.” New officers get a minimum of eight weeks training with a senior officer “before they’re even flying solo,” he said.

“I got all the respect for our officers,” the mayor said. “You know, what’s going on in the rest of the country, even 60 miles south of us [in Fargo], and we’re very fortunate, or have been, that you don’t see this on a daily basis.”

The chief said his department is trained and fully staffed with 18 full-time officers and no vacancies. Crookston, like many communities across the country after the pandemic, has grappled with upticks in violent crime, driven mostly by small bumps in aggravated assaults in the past few years, according to FBI and BCA statistics.

“The community, I’m not really sure what they’re thinking,” Stainbrook said. “There’s so many shootings through the whole country, and they just get numb to it..”

Stainbrook questions whether Fladland was put back to work too soon, but wouldn’t say whether he should return to the force.

Selzler, who declined interview requests, said in an email that department policy doesn’t have a set time for leave. St. Paul’s policy, for example, is a minimum leave of four days for an officer involved in a fatal shooting, with the option of up to seven days on request.

The duration of leave in Crookston is based on the totality of circumstances “as each incident has particular and unique facts which require an individualized determination,” Selzler said.

From what she knows about officer PTSD, LaCroix-Kinniry wonders if more leave would have made a difference: “If he has PTSD himself or is still dealing with that situation, then to have it happen again, you know, would he have reacted in a different way?”

The Minnesota Police and Peace Officers Association, Minnesota Chiefs of Police and Sheriffs’ associations, the Law Enforcement Labor Service and Polk County Sheriff James Tadman all declined or didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Star Tribune staff writer Jeff Hargarten contributed to this story.