St. Cloud man demands accountability after police stop him at gunpoint by mistake

A St. Cloud, Minnesota, man is demanding accountability after he said officers mistakenly stopped him at gunpoint outside his home, leaving him shaken and fearful.

Twenty-one-year-old Faisal Mohamed said he was in his driveway Thursday morning installing a child safety seat in his vehicle when St. Cloud police officers arrived and ordered him to put his hands up.

Body camera footage shows officers directing Mohamed to walk backward toward them with his hands visible.

Within a matter of seconds, police realized they had stopped the wrong person.

Mohamed said the encounter left him terrified.

"In the body camera footage, I'm crying and my heart was pounding," he said. "Very much fearful."

He added that the experience has been difficult to move past. 

"That whole incident just broke me," Mohamed said.

Mohamed questions how the mistake happened.

"They said the vehicle we were looking for was a Chevy Impala. I drive a Chevy Malibu. Two completely different cars," he said.

Mohamed believes race played a role in the stop.

"You're racially profiling me because I look like Somali," he said. "With all the Somali hate that's going on in this country and in this state, I genuinely felt helpless."

St. Cloud Police Chief Jeff Oxton declined an on-camera interview, but said in an email that officers were responding to what they believed was a suspect in an aggravated robbery case involving a handgun.

Oxton said officers were searching for a 22-year-old Somali man and that Mohamed's license plate matched the first three letters and the last digit of the suspect vehicle's plate. He also said the actual suspect was believed to live several houses away on the same street.

In body camera footage, one officer apologized to Mohamed, saying, "I'm really sorry... that was pretty f***** up."

With the city utilizing Flock cameras and automatic license plate readers in squad cars, Mohamed said he still doesn't understand how this happened.

He now wants answers from city leaders and law enforcement.

Oxton said he is scheduled to meet with Mohamed and review what led up to the stop.    

In an email, St. Cloud Mayor Jake Anderson said he has reached out to Mohamed and offered to sit in on a meeting with him and police. They are working to confirm a meeting, Anderson wrote.