Minneapolis Police Were Cleared in the 2013 Killing of Terrance Franklin. A Video Complicates the Story—and Now the Case May Be Reopened

Terrance Franklin Credit -

When Terrance Franklin was shot to death in a Minneapolis basement eight years ago, the only witnesses were the five police officers assembled to capture him. Two of them were bleeding—wounded by rounds from a police submachine gun the department declared the young Black man had managed to get control of in a brief struggle, a contest it said ended with Franklin’s death in a fusillade of immediate return fire. The officer who gave the most detailed account said the fatal encounter lasted “seconds.”

Franklin’s death was briefly a major story in the Twin Cities but nowhere else, not least because it was a story told by the police alone. On May 10, 2013, there was no body-camera footage that his skeptical family could demand be released, and no demands on the nightly news for an impartial inquiry. The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) investigated its own officers and concluded they had heroically taken down a would-be cop killer.

But there was a video, and it suggests a different story.

The video, shot by a passerby, begins after Franklin is supposed to be dead. It runs 62 seconds and, in visual terms, reveals nothing of note: cops running up and down a tree-lined street outside a house. The audio, however, captured voices from the basement of that house, whose side door had been opened to retrieve the wounded. Shouts carried up the stairs and onto a soundtrack that seems—on first listening, and even second and third—to be merely a murky cacophony: sirens, voices, radio traffic and, toward the end, the roar of a descending airliner.

But with careful listening, and an assist from noise-filtering software, troubling words can be made out.

“Mookie!” some eight seconds into the recording, is the first, according to a forensic audio expert hired by Franklin’s family. “Mookie” had been Franklin’s nickname since childhood, and relatives say they recognize the voice as his. All five officers had sworn the suspect never uttered a word.

Nineteen seconds later, what seems to be the same voice implores: “Man, let me go!”

Other shouts are audible:

“Damn freakin’ n—-r!”

“Come out, little n—-r!

“Don’t go putting those hands up now!”

Moments later, Franklin is killed by 10 pistol shots, five of them to the head.

“This was a straight-up execution,” says Michael Padden, the attorney for the Franklin family, which in 2014 filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the city of Minneapolis based on the recording. The lawsuit, which contains the language above, calculated that even if jurors could not make out every word, the tape exploded the police version of how Franklin had died. In addition to the prominent forensic audio expert who certified the authenticity of the recording, the family hired a forensic specialist in firearms. That expert reconstructed the shooting scene with the help of a private investigator who says two of the fatal bullets apparently were fired by officers holding their pistols side by side near Franklin’s head and pulling the triggers at the same time.

“To me, it was like assassination, and it wasn’t right,” says Walter Franklin, Terrance’s father. “If he had his hands up, he should have came out the basement handcuffed.”

Franklin died on a cusp. Five years earlier, his death might have remained lost among the uncounted Black and brown people killed in police encounters before cameras became ubiquitous. His family’s suspicions would have gathered not traction, but sympathetic nods: their word against the police’s. Had he been killed five years later, an outside agency would have investigated, perhaps with vigor. And Terrance Franklin might have been among the names that his father, listening to the radio one day this spring, heard a Minneapolis DJ solemnly recite: “… George Floyd, Jamar Clark, Justine Damond and others.”

Walter Franklin was so agitated he called the announcer. “I said, ‘You didn’t mention my son.’ He said, ‘What’s your son’s name?’ I said, ‘Terrance Franklin.’ He said, ‘I said others.’

“And I felt like, My son’s name is not others.”