Jurors have acquitted a man of murder after he argued that he acted in self-defense when he shot a man during a late-night clash involving several people outside a downtown Minneapolis bar.
A Hennepin County District Court jury on Thursday found Kevion J. Gibbs, 23, of West Point, Miss., not guilty on two counts of second-degree intentional murder in connection with the shooting of Deandre I. Smith, 33, of Minneapolis, in a parking lot after leaving Augie's Bar on Hennepin Avenue shortly after 2 a.m. on June 5, 2021.
The trial began on Feb. 7 with the selection of the jurors, who began deliberating midday Wednesday and came back with their verdicts the next day.
"The case was all about self-defense," Gibbs' lead attorney, Fred Goetz, said Friday. "He tried and tried and tried to get away, but he had no choice."
Gibbs, who testified in his defense, made "persistent and continual efforts to get his family away [from the others]. That's all he was doing for 15 minutes. Every time he got away, they kept pursuing him. It just kept getting more violent and more violent."
Goetz said Gibbs was leaving Augie's with his sisters, a brother and his pregnant girlfriend, when the brother was punched and "knocked to the ground. They thought he was dead. He was lying there motionless."
A spokesman for the County Attorney's Office said that members of Smith's family "were understandably very upset" when they heard the verdicts being read.
"As for the defense case, this was a chaotic scene after bar close," spokesman Nicholas Kimball said. "A verbal altercation escalated and a punch was thrown, making the scene even more chaotic. In that environment, the defendant made the tragic decision to pull out a handgun and shoot.
