‘Just shoot,’ said Winston Smith before fatal exchange of gunfire with cops

Winston B. Smith, who was fatally shot by sheriff’s deputies in Minneapolis more than three years ago, raised a handgun in the direction of officers and said “just shoot” before apparently exchanging gunfire with them, according to video of the incident made public on Friday.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said in a statement ahead of the release by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension that the deputies’ actions were legally justified and she would not file criminal charges against them.

Authorities did not release the officers’ names, as is standard practice after officer-involved shootings in Minnesota, because they were working undercover at the time of the incident. 

Moriarty’s decision not to charge the officers follows a similar legal determination that Crow Wing County Attorney Donald Ryan made in October 2021 after Mike Freeman, Moriarty’s predecessor, requested that a prosecutor from outside Hennepin County review the case file to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. 

The Hennepin and Ramsey County deputies, who were part of a federal fugitive task force, tracked Smith to the top of a parking garage in the city’s Uptown area on June 3, 2021 and tried to arrest him after he failed to appear at a sentencing hearing in a gun case. 

After the officers boxed in Smith’s vehicle, the 32-year-old attempted to livestream the confrontation. Smith was unable to transmit the video, but a 35-second clip was retained on his phone. 

The video begins with Smith looking at the camera as the deputies close in. Norhan Askar, a woman sitting in the front passenger seat, pleads with Smith to cooperate with the officers.

“Please let them take you! What the f—? Please open the door,” Askar says. 

“Just shoot,” Smith says quietly, then appears startled as a deputy uses a baton to break the glass on the driver’s side door. 

Smith then opens the car’s center console, pulls out a handgun, and raises it in the direction of officers. The BCA blurred the final 12 seconds of the video, which shows what authorities have said previously was an exchange of gunfire. The sound appears not to have been altered. No one else was seriously injured, but Askar suffered cuts to her leg from flying glass.

Following the shooting, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said that the incident was not captured on body-worn cameras. By 2021, most law enforcement agencies had begun requiring officers to use the equipment, but a U.S. Marshals Service policy in place at the time prohibited body cameras during federal task force operations. The Marshals Service changed its policy after Smith’s killing. 

The BCA began examining Smith’s phone soon after the incident but was unable to break its encryption. 

In late 2023, more than two years later, independent digital security experts were able to retrieve data from the device. After a third year passed, the BCA announced on Dec. 3, 2024 that its own investigators had also unlocked Smith’s phone after trying 780,000 password combinations. 

The deputies killed Smith, who was Black, at a tense time in Minneapolis. Seven weeks earlier, amid the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, former Brooklyn Center Officer Kimberly Potter fatally shot Daunte Wright, 20, during a traffic stop.

Smith’s killing drew large numbers of protesters to Uptown. Ten days after the shooting, demonstrator Deona Erickson, 32, was killed when a drunk driver crashed into a makeshift barricade on Lake Street. Nicholas D. Kraus, 39, is serving a 20-year sentence after pleading guilty to murder and assault.

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