As St. Paul police officers pulled up to a couple on a North End street in May, the man shot the woman in the face and turned the weapon on officers, leading to a gun battle, a prosecutor said Friday. A grand jury cleared four officers this week over fatally shooting the man.
The woman survived the shooting. Washington County Attorney Pete Orput, who handled the case to avoid a potential conflict of interest for the Ramsey County attorney’s office, said it appeared to him that Jaffort Demont Smith, 33, was determined to commit “suicide by cop.”
“It really did strike me as that because none of it made any sense whatsoever, including the numerous times the cops yelled at him to follow their commands and he just wouldn’t,” Orput said. “Right from the beginning, they were saying, ‘Drop it, drop it, drop it, drop it,’ until they had to do what they had to do.”
Smith shot Beverly “Angel” Flowers, who said she’d been spending a lot of time with Smith before he was killed, in the right side of her cheek, and the bullet exploded out her left eye. She underwent five surgeries to put the left side of her face back together. Doctors tried to save her eye, but they could not and it was removed in October.
Flowers, 49, said Friday that she is in constant pain from the shooting, but she had always felt safe with Smith in the short time she’d known him and doesn’t blame him for what happened.
Smith had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and had not been taking medication for it at the time of his death, Flowers said. She said Smith heard voices and that she told officers that he was hearing things that weren’t real.
“No one understands it wasn’t him — it was the voices only he could hear and he fought and couldn’t take,” Flowers said. “… They were so horribly real to him and those (people) around him … were starting to look and sound like those in his head. We were waiting for an open bed to get him help and it just wasn’t soon enough.”
The incident began May 9 at about 3:30 a.m. when officers responded to a 911 call about a man with a gun at Rapid Recovery, a towing company on Acker Street near Jackson Street, according to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Flowers entered the business and Smith followed her. He displayed a gun and took Flowers back outside, the BCA has said.
Police saw Smith and Flowers about four blocks away, near Acker and Buffalo streets, soon after. Two officers pulled up and, as they were getting out, Smith shot Flowers, Orput said.
“I don’t care how long you’ve been a cop — that’s pretty shocking,” Orput said. “Then, right after he shot her, he ran up the driveway of a house and started running behind the garage and as he did, he was shooting rounds at these two cops, and then it turned into a gun battle that went on for a few minutes.”
Orput said “many, many shots” were fired by Smith and four police officers. They were identified as John Corcoran, Mark Grundhauser, Jeffery Korus and Michael Tschida.
Meanwhile, Flowers was injured in the front of the home.
“While she’s in the line of fire, at least one of the cops ran and pulled her away while bullets were flying and that struck me as really heroic,” Orput said.
In his years of being a prosecutor, Orput said, he’s never seen a case “even close to this as far as the drama and the poignancy of it.”
“Poignant in the sense that I think it really, really hit the cops hard to have a guy shoot somebody right in front of you and then start a gun battle with you,” Orput said. “I was just really impressed with the courage and determination of these cops. Every instinct would tell me that if a guy’s got a gun and just shot somebody, you want to run away, but instead they do the exact opposite and run toward.”
The St. Paul police department has started asking outside agencies to investigate officer-involved shootings in the city. The Smith case was the first handled by the BCA for St. Paul.
The Ramsey County attorney’s office requested that their Washington County counterpart handle the case because one of the St. Paul officers involved is a son of a Ramsey County attorney’s office employee.
Orput convened a grand jury Wednesday and the 23 Ramsey County citizens on it determined the officers should not be charged, Orput said Friday.
Paul Applebaum, an attorney representing Smith’s family, said in a statement Friday: “Because grand juries are always conducted in secret, we have not had a chance to review the evidence presented at the hearing. Commenting on the “no bill” now is therefore not appropriate. It is important to remember that Mr. Smith’s death is a devastating loss to his family and many friends.”
Minnesota law says officers are justified in using deadly force “only when necessary to protect the peace officer or another from apparent death or great bodily harm,” among other reasons.