A rally for a Minnesota man killed by police took a dramatic turn Saturday when the mom he had shot at hours before he was fatally shot crashed the protest to call Andrew ‘Tekle’ Sundberg “a bad guy.”
In a dramatic scene caught on video outside the apartment complex where Sundberg, 20, was killed, an anguished woman identified as Arabella Yarbrough, 24, demanded to know why Sundberg was deemed a “good guy” all of the sudden. She accused Sundberg, who lived in the same complex, of nearly killing her and her children in the incident last week.
“I have black children,” she shouted over a protest leader who was using a megaphone to rally a small crowd gathered outside some apartments. “I’m a woman of color. If I would’ve lost my life, would you guys do this for me?”
“Yes ma’am,” the leader replies in the eight-minute clip.
“If I would have died, would he be a bad guy then?” she continues. “Why is he not a bad guy now?”
Yarbrough explained that she had been cooking dinner for her children when bullets came through their apartment door, adding that there were shell casings all over the hallway outside after the incident.
Sundberg was killed early Thursday after a standoff that began late Wednesday. He allegedly shot into the apartment where Yarbrough lived with her two children, then fired again at cops who rushed the family to safety.
Sundberg’s father, Mike, had tried to help negotiate the surrender of his son, who was barricaded in his apartment, but the six-hour standoff ended at 4:30 a.m. when two police snipers on a rooftop across the street fatally shot him. On Saturday, the elder Sundberg, who was at the protest, was seen trying to comfort Yarbrough as she railed against the demonstrators.
Sundberg’s mother, Cindy Sundberg, said her son, who they adopted from Ethiopia, was experiencing a “mental health crisis” when police responded to a report of shots fired in his apartment building, according to video released by family attorney Ben Crump on Twitter.
The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) reported that a mother with two young children called claiming that someone had shot into her apartment and that officers witnessed additional shots when they arrived on the third floor of the building.
“MPD Crisis Team Negotiators and MPD SWAT responded and attempted negotiations throughout the night and early morning hours. These attempts included identifying and calling the man’s cell phone as well as bringing the man’s parents to the scene to help,” wrote the MPD in its report.
The shooting of Sundberg, a black man, has further inflamed race relations in Minneapolis, where two years ago, George Floyd was killed by a police officer in an incident that touched off a summer of rioting around the nation. The police officer who killed Floyd was prosecuted and found guilty of murder.
The Sundbergs told reporters they don’t believe police would have shot one of their white biological children in the same situation.
“Everyone knows had it been a white person in that building they would have talked him out, they would have waited,” said Cindy Sundberg, who has nine children total with her husband, Mark.
Protesters on Saturday demanded that the police release video from the incident. The Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office is reviewing the body camera footage of the shooting. It will be shown to the family first before it is released to the public.