Fatal shooting by Burnsville police was justified, grand jury says

A grand jury has ruled that three Burnsville police officers were legally justified when they fatally shot a Chaska man in the parking lot of a McDonald's restaurant early on March 17, the Dakota County attorney said Tuesday.

Map Kong, 38, was shot 15 times by officers Taylor Jacobs, John Mott and Maksim Yakovlev after he ignored their commands to drop a large knife he was aggressively waving at them, County Attorney James Backstrom said in a news release. A Taser they had employed against him had no effect, Backstrom said.

The shooting took place after officers responded about 6:15 a.m. to a call about a man in a parked car acting suspiciously outside the fast-food restaurant off Hwy. 13 and Washburn Avenue. The man had been there much of the night, bouncing from side to side in the car and waving a knife, witnesses said.

"Due to fears for their own safety and the safety of others in the vicinity should Mr. Kong exit the vehicle with the knife, the officers made a decision to attempt to deploy a Taser to incapacitate Mr. Kong, which they did by breaking the passenger side windows and deploying this nonlethal weapon on two occasions," the news release said. "Unfortunately, the Taser had no effect upon Mr. Kong and he then bolted from the vehicle while carrying the knife. At that time three of the four Burnsville police officers at the scene fired their service weapons."

An autopsy found that Kong had been using amphetamine and methamphetamine, an autopsy found.

The death investigation carried out by the Sheriff's Office and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension made use of footage from body cameras worn by the officers involved in the incident.

It was the city's first fatal police shooting in 35 years.

Kong, who had lived in St. Paul before moving to Chaska, had a criminal history, with at least seven arrests since 1997 on suspicion of narcotics possession, firearms violations and domestic violence, records show.

"Although the grand jury has determined that the use of deadly force by these police officers was legally justified in this instance, any loss of life is a tragic occurrence," the county attorney's office said in the news release.