This certainly looks disturbing, at least so far

Several Minnesota readers have emailed us because they are outraged about this incident, in which Le Sueur County Sheriff's Deputy Todd Waldron, in plainclothes and driving an unmarked Dodge Durango, shot and killed a Kasota man named Tyler Heilman in a confrontation after Waldron had followed Heilman and a friend in their vehicle for around 20 minutes because Heilman was allegedly driving erratically.

Waldron trailed the pair to an apartment complex parking lot and subsequently blocked their car in, after which a physical altercation is said to have occurred. Heilman was unarmed and wearing only a swimsuit at the time. His passenger, Kris Hoehn, steadfastly maintains that Waldron never identified himself as a police officer during the stop and that they had no idea that he was in fact a cop until a badge was exposed on Waldron's belt during the struggle, and another eyewitness confirms that Waldron gave no warning before discharging his firearm:

"Heilman then flipped Waldron to the ground and the two "wrestled," though no punches were thrown, Hoehn said. Heilman eventually pinned Waldron and only then saw the badge clipped to Waldron's belt. He then jumped off the deputy with his hands in the air, Hoehn said.

Waldron "sprang up and shot" without any warning, Hoehn said."

...

"Jolene Manderfield, who lives in the Valley View Apartments where Heilman was shot, supported Hoehn's account of the shooting occurring without any warning."

We believe that the resulting investigation needs to be finished before any definitive conclusions can be reached about this incident, but it looks pretty ugly, at least at this point.

It certainly seems reasonable, at least to our layman's way of thinking, that standard department policy for any police force ought to dictate that should a plainclothes officer in an unmarked vehicle view a traffic violation, absent any immediately life-threatening circumstances they should first call for assistance from a marked unit complete with camera and unifomed officer with full force-escalation abilities before attempting to make the stop themselves. Waldron certainly had the time to do so as he was tailing Heilman all over the county.

That kind of prudent action would have safely solved this situation before it ended tragically, as we can easily see how Heilman and Hoehn, if their story is accurate, could reasonably believe that they were being followed in some sort of pending road-rage incident.

We will revisit this story once the the details are fully investigated, but based on the facts available so far we believe that the deadly force used by Deputy Waldron was completely unnecessary, could easily have been averted and should not be justified.