On Tuesday, a day after Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty defended her initial decision to charge the trooper who killed Ricky Cobb II and to later drop the charges, Cobb’s family said officials had failed them and once again not held law enforcement accountable, the Associated Press reports. “Black folks in this country oftentimes do not get to feel what justice looks like,” said Bakari Sellers, an attorney for the family. “And so when we go down this path, and we’re given a semblance of hope that this will be just, we gravitate towards that, only to be let down again.” Sellers and Cobb’s family criticized Moriarty and Democratic Gov. Tim Walz — who sparred publicly with the prosecutor over the case. They also said the family plans to ask the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to investigate the shooting.
Cobb, a 33-year-old Black man, died after Trooper Ryan Londregan, who is white, shot him as he tried to pull away from a traffic stop. Troopers pulled Cobb over on Interstate 94 in Minneapolis on July 31 because the lights were out on his car. They then found that the Spring Lake Park man was wanted for violating a domestic no-contact order in neighboring Ramsey County. Londregan shot Cobb twice as Cobb tried to drive away after troopers ordered him to get out of his car. The shooting added to the political turmoil surrounding law enforcement in a city still reeling from the police murder of George Floyd four years ago. Voters elected Moriarty, a former chief public defender for the county, in 2022 on a police reform platform. Cobb’s family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in April, alleging that the stop and the shooting were unjustified. That lawsuit is ongoing. “My son was an excellent son to me. He was fully grown, and he had aspirations. He was a father, and he was a human being, a working human being,” Cobb’s mother, Nyra Fields-Miller, said. “Make it make sense.”