A Dakota County grand jury on Thursday determined that an Eagan police sergeant was justified in fatally shooting a man who fired a handgun at officers last summer.
Sgt. Nathan Tennessen shot 37-year-old Justin Lee Kulhanek-Derks in August outside the Eagan townhouse where Kulhanek-Derks lived, according to the Dakota County attorney’s office.
Tennessen and two other officers were dispatched to 1284 Ironwood Lane just before noon on Aug. 28, after 911 callers reported that a man was firing a gun from a vehicle parked outside the address. When the officers arrived they ordered Kulhanek-Derks to get out of the car, but he attempted to back out of his parking space and fired a handgun at them, the county attorney’s office said.
Two of the three officers returned fire with assault rifles, and a bullet fired by Tennessen’s weapon struck Kulhanek-Derks in the head and killed him, an investigation by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension found. When the officers approached the vehicle, they found Kulhanek-Derks slumped over in the driver’s seat with a 9mm handgun in his left hand, the county attorney’s office said.
Emergency medical personnel pronounced him dead at the scene.
Investigators found 20 9mm cartridge casings at the scene and eight cartridge casings from the officers’ assault rifles. None of the officers was injured in the shooting.
Text messages recovered from cellphones belonging to Kulhanek-Derks and one of his relatives indicated Kulhanek-Derks was suicidal at the time of the shooting, and that he was “contemplating having a ‘mass shoot-out’ with police,” according to a memo from Phillip Prokopowicz, chief deputy Dakota County attorney.
Friends of Kulhanek-Derks told the Pioneer Press in August that he was distraught over a recent breakup at the time of his death, and that he had battled depression and alcoholism. An autopsy later determined that Kulhanek-Derks had a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.17 at the time of his death.
“I think between the alcohol, the depression and the heartache, he just snapped,” neighbor Laura Scott told the Pioneer Press in August.
Kulhanek-Derks lived at the townhouse with his teenage daughter, Scott said. He and his wife divorced in 2007, and he was raising the girl on his own.