Paramedic's tip led to Minneapolis cop's conviction

It was still daylight on a mid-September evening in 2019 when Ty Jindra, a young Minneapolis police officer working the middle shift, responded with his partner to a drug overdose call at a North Side house.

It all seemed routine — but to paramedics on the scene, what happened next wasn't.

Jindra disappeared into the house while the paramedics worked to stabilize the overdose victim on the front lawn. They knew "something was afoot" with Jindra, recalled Erica MacDonald, then U.S. attorney for Minnesota.

"Why was he going into the home?" she said. "The guy [suffering the overdose] was outside. Why did he need to go inside?"

One of the paramedics lodged a complaint about Jindra with the Minneapolis Police Department, which referred the matter to its internal affairs unit. The subsequent investigation mushroomed into a wide-ranging inquiry involving Jindra, 29, that led to his termination last year and his conviction Nov. 2 by a federal jury in St. Paul on five counts of stealing drugs he had confiscated and conducting unlawful searches.

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Jindra faces a maximum sentence of up to four years in prison on each count of acquiring a controlled substance and a maximum of one year in prison on each civil rights count. U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank has not yet set a sentencing date.

Jindra's body camera footage in the drug overdose case raised serious questions for the internal affairs unit and led police investigators to look at his bodycam footage in two other incidents in 2019.

What they found led to Jindra's suspension with pay, then referral of the case by Minneapolis police to the FBI.

MacDonald said that while some believe that the Minneapolis police engage in coverups, the department's work in the Jindra case showed it could conduct appropriate investigations when officer misconduct rises to the criminal level. She particularly credited the leadership of Police Chief Medaria Arradondo.

"When police officers violate the law, they will be held accountable," said MacDonald, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2018 and stepped down in February after the Biden administration took office.

Michelle Gross, president of Communities United Against Police Brutality, a local group, also applauded Jindra's conviction, saying his "conduct was dangerous to the community."

She added: "It is interesting that it took a medic to report his conduct. Surely some of his partners would have seen that sooner and should have reported it."

The overdose call that the paramedic brought to the attention of police occurred Sept. 19, 2019, at a house in the 2200 block of Bryant Avenue N. While his partner dealt with a person at the scene, Jindra entered the residence without legal justification, investigators said, and searched the house for drugs.

His video shows him going room to room, apparently looking for places where drugs might be hidden and searching a backpack in which he found what appear to be drugs.

Then for no apparent reason, Jindra turned off his body camera for more than six minutes. His lawyer claimed he just wanted to talk to his partner, but MacDonald said shutting off the camera was a violation of department policy.

The episode led investigators to review two incidents that happened earlier that year. The first occurred June 3, 2019, when Jindra was called to a north Minneapolis house concerning what looked like a bag of drugs on a garage roof. A few nights before there had been a police chase in the neighborhood and the homeowner saw someone wandering in her yard. The person being pursued had evidently tossed the bag on the roof.

According to Jindra's body camera footage, the bag contained a white substance later determined to be methamphetamine, between the size of a golf ball and a baseball, MacDonald said. But when Jindra went to the police property room, she said he turned in less than 1 gram — a tiny amount.

In another incident a month later, according to bodycam video, Jindra confronted a young driver at a service station for an expired tag. He ordered him out of the car, handcuffed him and conducted a search of his vehicle that appeared unwarranted and a violation of the man's constitutional rights.

Jindra's superiors met with him in October 2019 at a precinct station to discuss the three incidents. Sometime after the meeting, according to a court document, Jindra logged on to a police computer to add two reports to two of the three incidents, which prosecutors concluded was an apparent attempt to justify his conduct.

A few days later, Jindra was suspended with pay and the case was referred to the FBI. MacDonald was briefed, which she said is typical for a case involving a violation of the public trust and is likely to draw public attention.

"I remember instructing the chain of command to keep me updated at all times on developments," she said.

While on suspension, Jindra filed a medical claim with the Police Department that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder for being one of the first to respond to the shooting death of Justine Ruszczyk by police officer Mohamed Noor in 2017.

Jindra was terminated by the department on July 13, 2020, after he was found to have violated the department's search and seizure policy in connection with a 2017 complaint. In the meantime the federal investigation accelerated. On Nov. 4, 2020, he was indicted on 11 counts by a federal grand jury.

Body camera videos showed Jindra using various schemes to confiscate drugs, concealing it from the department and his partners and sometimes filing no reports that drugs had been found. The footage also showed him conducting searches after traffic stops that prosecutors believed weren't legally justified.

Several times he used latex gloves that he wore during traffic stops to encase drugs he had found, which he then put in his personal duty bag or in his own pocket. Some of his reports were filed without reference to finding any drugs.

At the trial that began last month, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Amber Brennan and Michelle Jones hinted that Jindra might have been consuming the drugs himself and noted that a family member was worried he had a drug problem. During a short discussion outside the jury's presence, Brennan said that in the last couple of years he had been hospitalized for overdosing on Xanax, a controlled substance used to treat anxiety, depression and panic disorders.

Defense attorneys Peter Wold and Aaron Morrison argued that Jindra threw away the drugs he confiscated but didn't produce evidence that he did so.

Wold asserted that the jury should find Jindra innocent because the prosecution had not proved he was addicted. Brennan countered he was not on trial for addiction and said it didn't matter whether he consumed the drugs or sold them — only that he kept them for his own use.

After a day and a half of deliberations, the jury of seven women and five men convicted Jindra on Nov. 2 on three counts of stealing drugs and two counts of illegal searches in violation of individuals' civil rights.

Judge Frank ordered a presentence investigation.

In the meantime, Jindra remains free so long as he abides by pretrial conditions of release.

Randy Furst • 612-673-4224