MINNEAPOLIS — A teenager has been sentenced to four years for his role in a St. Paul killing that set a sequence of events into motion that ended with the fatal police shooting of Amir Locke.
Feysal Jama Ali, 18, of Minneapolis, pleaded guilty earlier to being an accomplice after the fact in the killing of Otis Elder, 38, of St. Paul, during a marijuana deal Jan. 10, 2022. Ali was sentenced Wednesday as part of his plea deal.
Ali's cousin, Mekhi Camden Speed - then 17 - shot Elder as the deal was conducted on a street in St. Paul. Speed was sentenced in July to over 16 years after pleading guilty to aiding and abetting second-degree unintentional murder while committing an armed robbery.
Speed lived in an apartment building in downtown Minneapolis with family members, and police were looking for him when they served search warrants the morning of Feb. 2, 2022. Locke, 22, who was not named in the warrants, was sleeping on a couch in an apartment occupied by Speed’s brother and his brother's girlfriend when a SWAT team burst in looking for Speed.
A Minneapolis officer shot Locke as he emerged from under a blanket holding a handgun that his family said he was licensed to carry. Prosecutors did not charge the officer who killed Locke, saying the shooting was justified because Locke pointed his gun at the officer. Locke's family maintains body camera video suggests he was startled awake. They have campaigned since then for a ban on no-knock warrants.
Locke was killed in the same time frame when three former Minneapolis police officers were on trial in federal court in St. Paul on civil rights charges in the killing of George Floyd, a case that forced a racial reckoning and focused attention of the use of force by police.
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