Anti-violence groups helps subsue gunman
By Ren Clayton
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MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Police say an innocent man died trying to do the right thing. A gunman running from a car crash on Friday morning shot and killed the man in North Minneapolis when the bystander tried to intervene.
Investigators say the shooter then tried to carjack a woman outside a Cub Foods before a crowd managed to pin him to the ground. The group was there for that exact reason.
“We don’t usually get into stuff like this, but today was a different day,” said Ken Brown with the nonprofit organization We Push For Peace. The group was on the scene immediately, because they work security for that Cub Foods every day. They played a big role in ending the incident.
The group, which has been around for over a year, pinned down the suspect until the police arrived.
“It’s about the actions…Will you turn a blind eye or are you going to intervene? I chose to intervene,” said Jerrod Jackson, a We Push For Peace member who assisted in pinning down the suspect.
We Push For Peace also provides many other services, such as financial education and mental health assistance. But security is the vast majority of their work. The Cub Foods in north Minneapolis was their first store partner.
“The good part about it though is we actually had police, boots on the ground organization, community members, and everybody else all joining forces to do what we’re trying to do,” said We Push For Peace’s Pharoah Merritt.
We Push For Peace is trained for extreme situations like this. Police say most bystanders should not get involved and call 911.
“We can’t stop the killing. We can’t stop the robbing. But we can slow it down a little bit,” Brown said. “I think what we do, we are slowing it down a little bit.”
The suspected shooter has not been charged. Police think he was in the neighborhood to buy or sell drugs. The victims from the original car crash went to the hospital but should be OK. The woman the gunman tried to carjack was not hurt.
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