Davis Moturi reflects on failed pleas to Minneapolis police that led to him being shot in his own yard
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Davis Moturi lay awake in bed last October, eyes on the ceiling, unable to shake the burning image of his neighbor pointing a gun directly at him through the bedroom window.
The week before, that neighbor — a white man named John Sawchak — had brandished a large knife from his own upstairs window next door, where he often tracked Moturi. Sawchak had screamed racial slurs at Moturi, who is Black, threatening to kill him.
It began about a year ago, soon after Moturi and his wife Caroline moved into the small house on Grand Avenue in the Lyndale neighborhood of Minneapolis. It was the first home they purchased — a milestone the young couple had little time to celebrate before the torment began.
Too anxious to sleep, Moturi re-lived it, instead. He could still hear Sawchak bang pots and pans, then blast air horns outside their bedroom window. He recalled the feces shoved in his mail slot, felt the terror of Sawchak encroaching on him with a long gardening tool and screaming that the neighborhood had become “ghetto” ever since he moved in.
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Moturi imagined he must be living on an island — far from a police station where he could get any help. Except, that wasn’t the case.
The 5th Precinct police station was one mile away.
He had been calling the police, pleading with them to do something for a year now, but they said they couldn’t do anything if Sawchak didn’t come outside. One officer suggested the couple move out, which Moturi later learned was what a Black family who previously lived in their house did, facing similar threats and no relief from the police.
But Moturi refused to be driven out. He thought of Black people who stayed in their homes in the same city, a century ago, standing their ground through hurled rocks and mobs, through white neighbors who wanted them out. He was determined to survive it, too, though he had preparations in place if he didn’t.
At only 34, Moturi had a will at the ready. He made a note to keep looking into renting a billboard to broadcast his pleas and pressure the police into saving him. He didn’t know what else to do.
After seven hours, the sun rose, bringing light into his room. He could finally get some rest.
Ten days later, Moturi was shot while trimming a tree in his front yard. It took the police about five days after that to arrest Sawchak.
The prosecution of Sawchak — who is still in custody — is on hold after doctors found him mentally unfit to stand trial.
MPR News combed through court documents and spent hours with Moturi, as he continues to recover from a year of torment police apparently couldn’t stop until after the trigger was pulled. What emerges is a portrait of frustration and terror that has left Moturi unable to find peace.
‘It feels like I’ve come back from war’
It’s been more than 160 days since Moturi was shot. The bullet broke two ribs and lodged near his spine. It was removed in January, but there’s a lot more that the surgical procedure couldn’t fix. The feeling of danger has stuck, occupying his body as he has attempted to heal.
“It’s like John is still here,” Moturi said, sitting on a couch in the same home his neighbor wanted him to leave.
There are the physical symptoms — the incision that keeps reopening, the aches in his ribs mimicking heart pain, the tenderness in the path where the bullet traveled through and the numbness that followed, when it was removed. But then there are the mental wounds, he said — of which there’s no timeline for when he’ll feel normal again.
“I just feel like a different person,” Moturi said. “It feels like I’ve come back from war.”
Every morning, Moturi said, he wakes up and feels the creep of anger again, remembering how he and his wife were forced to endure it all alone. It’s the new déjà vu that replaced watching his back, waiting for the attack, hearing a slur, seeing a knife.
The outlets that used to bring him joy either don’t feel the same anymore or physically hurt him to do. Moturi doesn’t want to go out with friends, even though he used to be the one pitching social plans every weekend. Outside his house, it feels like he’s being watched, like everyone knows who he is. He can’t rollerblade and wouldn’t want to anymore, anyway. He knows he’s depressed. It doesn’t make it easier.
So he’ll try something else — video games, Netflix, something to take his mind off of everything — until he feels a hard ache in his ribs and remembers what happened, he said. Until he sees a cop car drive by and it feels like his head might explode. Until he sees Police Chief Brian O’Hara lauding the police department’s progress toward reform, and his blood boils again.
“It doesn’t let me forget what happened and forget what the people did,” he said. “Of course there’s some anger toward John, but most of the anger is directed toward the city and the police who did nothing — because they had a chance to stop it numerous times, and they chose not to.”
“They just didn’t care,” Moturi continued. “And I know I didn’t have the right complexion for protection. And it showed by the way they treated me throughout that whole experience.”
Looking for help from those who profiled him
Moturi said he expected unfair treatment from police. He’d grown accustomed to it, first as a Black boy, then a Black man. There was that first time, around age 16, when cops followed his car and unnecessarily searched it — for no crime but sitting parked in a suburban neighborhood. He had been watching a video on his iPod.
There was an unreasonable search in 2018 on Hennepin Avenue — apparently justified by a license plate light that was out. In 2023, when Moturi was near a parking garage in Uptown, two officers yelled and cussed at him to come back so they could question him.
Moturi saw on social media that cops were looking for Black men on ATVs in the area, though they had different skin shades, different clothes, different hair.
“As I’m walking toward them, their eyes lock on me and instantly I was like ‘Oh, OK.’ I know that look because I’ve seen it before from officers,” he said. “I could turn around and leave and just not have this interaction. But at the same time, it’s like, what are they gonna do to me?”
Despite dehumanizing interactions with police, Moturi said he looked to MPD for help when Sawchak began harassing him.
Actually, one of the officers who he believed profiled him then, Moturi recalls, showed up the first time he reported an incident with Sawchak in October of 2023. The neighbors had been arguing about a tree on their shared property line, according to court documents filed a year later, when Sawchak started hurling racial slurs — then crossed into Moturi’s lawn with threats to “take care of” him. He reportedly directed sprinklers at Moturi’s house, soaking his property.
At that point, Sawchak already had an extensive record with the police and courts, stretching back nearly two decades. His record included a criminal conviction for slashing the tires of a Minneapolis Police Department officer which barred him from possessing firearms.
There was also an active warrant for Sawchak’s arrest after he failed to show up to court in 2023, after being charged for striking an elderly neighbor with a 4-foot piece of wood. She had filed two restraining orders against Sawchak — and wasn’t the first of his neighbors to do so.
A Black mother of three young children had filed two restraining orders against Sawchak over continuous harassment — never resulting in an arrest. According to the petition, Sawchak had screamed at her son while he showered and even attempted to burn their house down.
Her children were afraid to go to the bus stop. They were afraid to sleep. Over the course of five years, despite repeated calls for help, police officers said they couldn’t arrest Sawchak if he didn’t come outside or to the door, often taking “the longest time to come.”
All of this became familiar to Moturi, even as the threats escalated and he secured a restraining order against his neighbor by April. Repeatedly, Moturi said the police told him the same story: they just couldn’t get him. Moturi said there were times when he called and received a response hours later — if at all. In more than one instance, officers suggested he move.
“It made me feel like I was in some sort of movie set in the ‘50s, where the Klan is attacking this Black guy and his family and the police do nothing,” Moturi said. “Or they’re in cahoots with the Klan and they look the other way. That’s essentially what it felt like.”
By the time he was shot, Moturi had called the police at least 19 times, according to court docs.
When that never seemed to amount to anything, he turned to sending out emails like a lifeline, hoping someone would tug: the mayor, the police chief, 311, prosecutors, “half the city,” he said, even the feds. In February of 2024, he looped in his council member, Andrea Jenkins, who continuously raised the issue with police leadership — to apparently no avail.
“If you can’t ask for help, what is the purpose of government? If not to help people? Of policing, if not to keep people safe?” Moturi said. “You’re only extending that hand to a certain group of people.”
According to court documents, Moturi tried to install cameras on the side of his house at the start of March of 2024. While on the ladder, Sawchak approached him with a long gardening tool with a metal end, holding it over his shoulder like an axe. He said he would put Moturi in the hospital like he had put other people. Moturi, prepared to defend himself after months of threats, took aim with pepper spray, warding Sawchak off.
Moturi said by the end of the next day, he received a phone call from a top officer in the fifth precinct. The officer told him prosecutors wouldn’t press charges against Sawchak because Moturi had brandished a gun and wasn’t doing himself any favors — a claim that confused and troubled him, since he hadn’t brandished a gun.
Moturi said it felt like he was being threatened into silence. Why else would he receive a random call with no clear protocol driving it?
MPD would not comment on this incident while it may be under review from an external investigation.
The next month, Sawchak allegedly attacked Moturi with a shovel. Moturi said Sawchak approached him outside, yelling at him to get off his property — though Moturi was on his own side, cleaning up feces that he says Sawchak had placed there. For the first time, Moturi was able to physically restrain his tormentor.
While he restrained Sawchak, Moturi said he asked his neighbors to call the police — and they explained that Sawchak was a known threat in the neighborhood and the subject of restraining orders and warrants.
When officers arrived, the group, again, urged them to arrest Sawchak. But Moturi said officers, instead, yelled at him as if he had been the perpetrator — then comforted Sawchak, ignoring pleas to arrest him now that he was in their reach. When police turned their backs, Moturi said his neighbor darted back inside, escaping arrest.
Court documents do not include this incident. However, Moturi has an audio recording from a later police interaction, in which an officer says he had heard what had happened and apologized for the actions of the officers who apparently let Sawchak go.
It took about six months from the onset of the harassment before Sawchak was charged with a misdemeanor, by warrant, for causing emotional distress to another person.
It wasn’t until early July — more than eight months from the onset — that Sawchak was charged with a felony for threats of violence.
And that happened after Moturi’s wife Caroline, who is white, was outside cleaning up human feces that Sawchak had allegedly left on their lawn. Moturi reported that Sawchak had threatened him with a six-inch knife the night before, declaring “I should have killed you last night.”
Caroline Moturi reported receiving death threats while cleaning up the feces. About a week later, the felony charges, by warrant, came.
“A warrant was only issued when I, his white wife, reported I was being verbally threatened,” she wrote in a GoFundMe that remains open for the Moturi family, while Moturi remains unable to work.
Still, Sawchak remained free and continued to threaten Moturi and his wife for more than three months. Moturi kept reporting it, and Sawchak remained in his home.
According to court documents, in late October Sawchak allegedly fired at Moturi from an upstairs window. Caroline Moturi found him in a fetal position, bleeding on the ground near the front door, where he had retreated after the attack.
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office filed charges including attempted murder, stalking and harassment, stemming from racial bias, even before Sawchak’s arrest. At the time, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty noted that prosecutors had not been informed of Sawchak pointing the gun or brandishing a knife and screaming racial slurs earlier that month.
“Those cases were not submitted to us by MPD so we were unaware of them until Mr. Moturi was shot,” she wrote in an email to council member Andrea Jenkins. “We have included those crimes in the attempted murder complaint.”
Several city council members penned a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and O’Hara, expressing “utter horror” at MPD’s “failure to protect” Moturi.
“We further urge MPD and the Mayor to offer a full explanation of how and why MPD has once again failed to do its job and a Black man has once again paid the price,” the letter reads.
‘I never expected to be talked about in that way’
Moturi said his anger with MPD isn’t just about what they didn’t do — but what its leadership said after the shooting. Despite more than a year of escalating harassment — including physical attacks and a slew of racist aggression — the police chief initially placed more blame on Moturi than he did his own department.
Two days after the shooting, O’Hara faced the public and said the victim was injured while cutting a tree the suspect had threatened him not to touch. He said the situation had escalated “in part” because of actions from the victim — adding that the victim hadn’t personally called a lieutenant who had offered his number for when the neighbor appeared outside. He said the lieutenant had visited the suspect’s house at least 20 times.
Due to the suspect’s history of mental illness and firearm possession, the likelihood of an armed violent confrontation was high, O’Hara said. Plus, the “rhetoric around policing” makes it harder for officers to do their job, he said.
“Anyone who suggests that the cops don’t want to arrest this person is simply wrong. To be frank, the officers, however, are scared. They’re scared of being prosecuted if they get into a situation where they make a mistake trying to do their job and protect the public,” he said. “If we do go in with a SWAT team and wound up in a deadly force situation, the headlines would read ‘MPD shoots a mentally ill person.’”
Moturi remembers watching all of this from his hospital bed, where he lay stiff, concussed and unable to defend himself. He had called the lieutenant at least eight times, none of which saved him during his year of hell. The neighbor dispute framing was wrong, too — and why hadn’t the chief so much as alluded to the racism?
Tubes drained blood from Moturi’s lungs. Yet Sawchak remained free.
“I never expected to be talked about in that way by somebody of that stature,” Moturi said months later, wondering how it would have been framed if he had died. “I’ve called the cops 30 times to get help. You get a restraining order, you do all these things and you’re still painted as the aggressor.”
Two days after giving his initial remarks, and after much public outcry, O’Hara switched course at a press conference, admitting the department “failed this victim 100 percent” and had not acted with enough urgency — though he said understaffing had an impact.
“To that victim, I say, I am sorry that this happened to you,” he said.
The department had not yet arrested Sawchak.
At that same press conference, Mayor Jacob Frey stood beside O’Hara, making it clear, first, that the chief and officers had his “full support.” Frey later issued a statement that plainly stated the chief would be keeping his job as some called for O’Hara to resign.
O’Hara said they were working to exhaust options for resolving the situation without force and promised a full review of the incident, which Frey supported.
That night — nearly five days after the shooting — Sawchak was arrested after an hours-long SWAT operation that ultimately resolved when police told him they were about to use gas in the building.
In the days after that, the Minneapolis Police Department also announced a partnership with the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP to help resolve disputes between neighbors through community mediation. The goal at the time was to launch last December.
Minneapolis NAACP president Cynthia Wilson said the framework for the pilot program was approved by MPD on March 18 — six days after MPR News asked for an update.
That hasn’t felt like any step toward justice for Moturi. Instead, he sees it as “window dressing.” That partnership wouldn’t have changed anything for him, he said. He wasn’t afraid to call the police and he rejects the notion that it was a dispute.
“It was a racist who wanted me to leave because of the color of my skin,” he said.
A week after Moturi was shot, city officials announced there would be an independent review of the events leading up to the incident. Last month, the city auditor announced it was taking up a review and put out a request for an outside group to take that on.
“MPD remains fully engaged in this review process and is committed to implementing necessary changes, procedures and partnerships to address any identified gaps when these reviews are concluded,” Sgt. Garrett Parten, the department’s public information officer, wrote in a statement.
He wrote that “MPD has conducted a thorough review of the violent incident involving Davis Moturi.”
When asked directly by MPR News, the department did not provide updates on disciplinary actions or changes implemented in the department as a result of the shooting and the events that led up to it, noting they would not speak on the case until the city’s external audit is complete.
Parten added that the Moturi family was offered the opportunity to meet with O’Hara in October, but they declined and told MPD they would reach out if they changed their minds. Moturi confirmed that MPD made the offer while he was still in the hospital. However, he denies saying they’d reach out if they changed their minds.
Back on Grand Avenue, John Sawchak’s house remains empty while he is held in custody. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office said it was putting a pause on prosecution after a doctor concluded that Sawchak was mentally unfit to stand trial.
They had objected to an incompetency ruling earlier this year, but withdrew that after a second evaluation.
“We expect Mr. Sawchak to remain in custody and we will resume our prosecution should he be restored to competency. The safety of the victims and our community remains HCAO’s top priority in this case,” the attorney’s office said in a statement.
The windows on Sawchak’s house — which is on the brink of foreclosure — remain boarded up.
Moturi has stayed next door and intends to keep it that way. He said after refusing to give up his house, and surviving, he and Caroline plan to hold onto the property for the rest of their lives.
Inside, he waits for someone from the police department, the mayor’s office or city auditor’s office to reach out to him with questions about what happened. It hasn’t happened yet. He lost faith in them coming to him long ago.