Sources: Cops who witnessed 2013 Terrance Franklin shooting want immunity for new information

Eight years after a grand jury cleared police of wrongdoing, three Minneapolis officers who were on the scene of the fatal shooting of Terrance Franklin have retained attorneys and two of them are in talks with Hennepin County prosecutors over immunity from potential charges in exchange for new information about what happened that day, according to sources familiar with the case.

Minneapolis police SWAT officers shot 22-year-old Franklin 10 times in the basement of a home in Uptown on May 10, 2013, including multiple times in the head. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman announced a few months later that a grand jury had declined to indict the officers in the shooting. "That means that they did not find sufficient evidence to reach the standard of probable cause that any criminal charge is warranted in the death of Mr. Franklin," Freeman said in a news conference in September 2013. "The criminal process is now completed." Some of the officers involved in the shooting have since left the force.

Since the police murder of George Floyd, activists have pushed to reopen investigations into Franklin and other people killed by Minneapolis police, and an exposé from TIME this summer resurfaced unanswered questions related to the shooting.

"The Franklin case continues to be under review by our office and there is much work to be done," said Lacey Severins, a spokeswoman for Freeman's office, when asked for records related to the 2013 determination to not charge. "A final decision is not imminent."

Severins would not comment on the Star Tribune's reporting Monday. "The Hennepin County Attorney's Office does not comment on ongoing investigations," she said.

Tasha Zerna, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office, also declined to comment on whether federal prosecutors are involved in talks with the officers.

After the TIME article came out, Freeman said audio from a witness video and a new explanation for how Franklin's DNA ended up on an officer's weapon were among reasons for the BCA to reopen the case. The BCA declined to reinvestigate, saying that Freeman's request only referenced "potential new evidence."

BCA Superintendent Drew Evans wrote in a July response that the bureau met with Minneapolis police, the Minneapolis City Attorney's Office and Franklin family attorney Mike Padden, and none had new evidence sufficient to reopen an investigation.

"There's no active investigation at this time," BCA spokesman Bruce Gordon said Monday. "As stated in Superintendent Evans' July 26 response to County Attorney Freeman, 'there does not appear to be new evidence that would require additional investigation.' The BCA will re-evaluate if new evidence or information comes to light."

The FBI did not respond to questions as to whether they are involved in a new investigation.

The Franklin shooting predates Minneapolis police using body-worn cameras, so there is no video showing an objective perspective of what happened as the officers pursued Franklin, who was wanted for questioning in a burglary, into the Minneapolis basement that day. Five officers — Ricardo Muro, Andy Stender, Mark Durand, Lucas Peterson and Michael Meath — followed him down the stairs, and Peterson and Meath fired the shots. Muro, Stender and Durand have retained lawyers and entered into the talks with Freeman's office, according to sources.

Attorney Paul Engh confirmed he is representing Muro, but said he hadn't spoken with the prosecutors about immunity.

Attorneys for the other officers — Thomas Plunkett, Robert Paule and Deborah Ellis — did not return calls for comment. And the Minneapolis Police Department did not respond to a message seeking comment about the case.

Franklin's family has persistently rejected the police version of events of what happened that day: that Franklin, unarmed and cornered, wrestled a gun away from the police and shot two officers, forcing police to return fire. In a federal lawsuit, the family alleged police executed Franklin. Padden wrote a book alleging police covered up a murder to make it look like a defensive shooting.

Last year, Minneapolis agreed to pay Franklin's family $795,000 to settle the lawsuit out of court.

Padden, who declined to comment for this story, hired an audio engineer to enhance garbled audio from a low-quality video recorded by a passerby who saw police raiding the Uptown house that day. According to the lawsuit, Franklin can be heard identifying himself as "Mookie" — his nickname — in an exchange that began after the officers were shot. Franklin pleaded for the SWAT team to let him go, and they responded by shouting racial slurs, according to the suit.

The lawsuit says the police timeline doesn't align with the audio — Franklin was supposed to be dead when the exchange took place — and a bullet lodged in Franklin's armpit supports the theory that Franklin was holding his hands up in surrender when the officers shot him, which conflicts with the police version of events.

The Internal Affairs Division of the Minneapolis Police Department investigated the shooting and ultimately cleared the officers of wrongdoing. But the investigators waited weeks to interview some of the officers involved in the shooting, according to the lawsuit.

Since closing the Franklin case in 2013, Freeman's office has changed the way it handles cases of police officers shooting civilians in an effort to create more transparency. Freeman has stopped using the secretive grand jury process to make a charging determination, opting instead for his office to decide whether charges are warranted.

Minneapolis police now outsource these cop-involved shooting cases to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, instead of investigating them in-house.

Andy Mannix • 612-673-4036