After kicking a man in the face so severely that it caused him a traumatic brain injury, Christopher Reiter never wrote in a report when he was a Minneapolis police officer that he feared the man had a knife. None of the other officers on the scene the night of May 30, 2016, wrote anything about a knife, either.
More than a year later, Reiter testified Thursday during his trial for third-degree assault that he was told the man he kicked, Mohamed Osman, had a knife. He said he needed to use force to protect his partner.
"I thought he had a knife. I thought he had it out," Reiter, 38, said. "I thought he was engaging [another officer]."
Reiter was the first to respond to the Midtown Exchange building in south Minneapolis on an assault report. He found a woman whom Osman had badly beaten, and then heard on the radio from another officer at the scene that Osman was parked in an SUV outside the building.
Surveillance video shows several officers surrounding Osman as he sat on the driver's side. He got out with his hands up, then knelt to the ground, when he was kicked twice by Minneapolis officer Josh Domek. Reiter then rounded around the car door and kicked Osman in the face, causing him to collapse unconscious.
Reiter's argument that Osman was armed was bolstered in the afternoon by testimony from the woman whom Osman beat. She told the Hennepin County jury her last words to Reiter before he left her to confront Osman.
"Be careful," she said she told Reiter. "This guy has a knife. Be careful."
Reiter told the jury that when he came to the apartment building that night he had never before seen such violence inflicted on someone. He appeared to choke back tears as he described the woman's injuries, barely able to describe them.
