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Ethics complaint likely over Ricky Cobb II shooting
Two months after the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office dropped the high-stakes case over the shooting of Ricky Cobb II by Minnesota State Trooper Ryan Londregan before ever going to trial, FOX 9 confirmed Monday that the state’s largest police organization is readying a professional conduct complaint against County Attorney Mary Moriarty for how she handled the prosecution.
MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) - For the first time, we are getting an in-depth look at the closed Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigative case file Hennepin County prosecutors relied on, in part, to charge State Trooper Ryan Londregan with murder, manslaughter, and assault in the deadly traffic stop shooting of Ricky Cobb II.
It comes nearly two months after the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office dropped the high-stakes case before ever going to trial, and at a time when the two sides continue to spar over legal issues outside the courtroom.
FOX 9 confirmed Monday, the state’s largest police organization is readying a professional conduct complaint against County Attorney Mary Moriarty for how she handled the prosecution.
As for the now-closed BCA file, it includes body camera and squad footage from the three state troopers involved in the deadly traffic stop encounter with Cobb along I-94 in Minneapolis during the early morning hours of July 31 last year.
There is also dispatch audio recordings after Cobb is shot and his vehicle is rolling down the freeway before crashing.
"Anyone have an update," a voice asks on the recording. "We have three gunshot wounds to the abdomen"
There are crime scene photos, search warrants, and evidentiary logs, more than 1,300 pages in total. It also includes audio-recorded interviews with State Patrol trainers with direct questions focused on use-of-force tactics and taking seatbelts off uncooperative subjects.
"We teach them how to do a single extraction, and then we teach them how to do a team extraction, approaching from the driver's side and the passenger side to try to do under the seatbelt and maintain control, power to control the suspects so that we can limit the amount of risk going into the car," State Patrol Sgt. Jason Halvorson responds to one such inquiry.
Moriarty said when filing the controversial charges, her team relied heavily on the belief that Londregan and the other troopers failed to properly follow their training in dealing with Cobb. But she eventually dropped the case in early June, before ever going to trial.
"This was one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make," Moriarty said at a June 3 news conference.
In a BCA transcribed interview with Hennepin County prosecutors and Trooper Brett Seide, who first initiated the traffic stop and was inside Cobb’s vehicle when Londregan fired, Seide is quoted as saying, "If Trooper Londregan did not use force to stop this threat, the outcome would have been worse."
The statement continued, "There’s a plethora of outcomes that could have changed if Trooper Londregan did not use force to try to stop this threat."
One other interesting note in the BCA file, special agents were still collecting evidence in the case on May 30, specifically the unused stop sticks from Trooper Londregan’s squad car just days before prosecutors ultimately dropped the case.
While the criminal matter is over, there is a federal lawsuit filed by the Cobb family still pending and the State Patrol’s internal review continues to determine whether Trooper Londregan will return to his job. Troopers Seide and Garrett Erickson have both been reinstated to full status.