By Chrisleen Herard, Howard University News Service
Khalil Ahmad Azad wanted his long-time girlfriend, Carvona Henderson, to take five pregnancy tests to make sure it was real; he was going to be a father. It was all he talked about, a moment he waited for his whole life until the early hours of July 3, 2022, when he was pulled over by police – the last time he would be seen alive.
Seven weeks later, his daughter was born.
“He was just trying to do anything to see his child,” Henderson said.
It was almost 1:30 in the morning when officers in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, said they attempted to pull over a driver of a white SUV for “probable cause DWI.” Instead of a simple traffic stop, a chase ensued.
“We’ve got a vehicle that’s fleeing from me and looks like it’s gonna crash here. …Driver’s bailing,” Officer Tony Heifort is heard saying on police body camera footage.
The SUV hit a curb and crashed into a tree. Azad, who reportedly had an active warrant at the time, fled, both in fear of his life and in hopes that he wouldn’t get arrested and miss witnessing the birth of his first child.
“He’s had run-ins where the police have beaten him before,” Henderson said. “So, he’s scared of the police. He want[ed] to see his daughter born, and he just [didn’t] wanna get arrested. He [didn’t] know what they [were] gonna do to him.”
According to Henderson, she was in the car when Azad was pulled over by police for an active warrant in Dec. 2020. Azad, who was wearing a neck brace from a car accident the month before, was repeatedly slammed into the ground.
“When they pulled us over, they had about eight AK guns in our faces,” Henderson said. “He had his hands up. … and they grabbed him out the car, slammed him on the car [and] put their knee in his back. He kept saying ‘It was hurting,’ and they kept slamming him and slamming him into the ground.”
Monica Lopez, a close friend of Azad, further detailed his past with police. “I feel like ever since I’ve known this man, I just know that every encounter he’s had with the police has just been a horrible outcome. Every time. The police really [did] not like him, like he was known out here by them, by name and everything.”
“I really felt like they were out to get him.”
In addition to the past run-ins and alleged brutality, Lopez and a close family friend by the name of Liah Milli, recount the times Azad spent in jail.
“Whenever I would go see him, he would tell me about instances with, not even just the police, but with the correctional officers that were in there about how they would be treating him,” Lopez said. “Like even with just small things, not letting him go out or putting him in solitary.”
“If it wasn’t them taking his food or his freedom away, the little freedom that he did have at that, it was them talking bad about him or doing something to him. It was always something and I just, I felt so bad all the time, but I couldn’t do anything.”
“Every time he was in jail, I was one of the first people that he always called,” Milli said. “The last time he went to jail, they had to switch his room from somebody because he said some older dude that was his cellmate was trying to pick fights with him, and they were trying to do stuff to him in there. The guards with his food and stuff like that.”
“He would just feel like he didn’t have anybody at times, and he felt alone. He felt like he was fighting demons. … And he would just call, you know, just to ask for support and help.”
According to the Police
Two passengers, a man and a woman, exited the car and told police they didn’t know Azad. The woman later said that she only knew him as “K,” and that there were no signs of him being drunk.
“Driver bailed towards the lake, headed eastbound,” Heifort reported on his radio.
A state patrol helicopter with a thermal imaging system, police K-9s and officers from the Plymouth Police Department were called onto the scene.
“Police K-9! You’re under arrest! Give yourself up now! Dog will be set! Dog will find you! Dog will bite you!” an officer yelled while searching through the woods.
A hat was eventually found, however, after about an hour of looking, police claim they failed to locate Azad and never came into direct contact with him that day.
“He’s long gone at this point,” Officer Joshua Heasley said, minutes before turning off his body camera.
Where’s Khalil?
“Everybody was looking for him,” Milli said. “Nobody knew where he was. Nobody knew what happened. … He wasn’t answering the phone.”
“Once he got out of the car, that was the last time everybody seen him.”
“I had spoken to him the day he went missing,” Lopez said. “We were actually supposed to get together that night, but because I got off work very late, I was tired, so I just wasn’t up for being around anyone. … It was just something that I was hoping to push to the next day.”
“But then, when his mom called me looking for him and telling me she hasn’t seen him since Saturday, my heart just dropped because I’m like, ‘No. What do you mean? I was just talking to him.’”
“ And a couple hours later, she call[ed] me and she [told] me that he was gone and that they had found him in Crystal Lake. And, um, he was dead. He wasn’t here anymore.”
Henderson recalled the day Azad’s body was discovered. “His friend wrote to me and was like, ‘He’s dead,’ and I was pregnant. I was eight months pregnant.”
“I just remember falling to the floor, just screaming, crying. I didn’t have [any] answers. I didn’t. I was losing my mind. I don’t think there’s really no words that could describe that pain I felt.”
Azad was found lifeless, floating face down in Crystal Lake’s shores two days after his run-in with police. His skin, stained purple and blue after his heart could no longer pump blood through his body, was swollen and disfigured like bruised fruit. His eyes protruded from their sockets as if they were unreal. His nose was slanted from being broken, and his face torn with scars.
This was no longer the Azad who once stood 6 feet tall with gorgeous brown locs and a warm, welcoming smile. Azad was unrecognizable.
“When I first seen the [autopsy photos], I literally had a physical reaction and jumped,” Traheren Crews, founder of Black Lives Matter Minnesota, said.
“I mean, I had heard about this earlier in the summer. But to actually see it? … They said he was beaten worse than Emmett Till and then once I seen the photos I was like, ‘Wow.’”
Milli has a similar reaction. “I didn’t even know what to say; I thought it was a joke,” she said. “Nobody believed that, that was him. …’Cause you know, Kalil was a handsome person. He was handsome.”
Lopez, like many others, thought it was unreal. “I just felt like I froze. I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. I can’t put it to him because it just, it looks nothing like him. His whole face is disoriented. It’s not even the man that I know.”
“It’s something you literally see in a movie,” Henderson said. “You wouldn’t think that, that could possibly happen to a human. It’s inhumane. I felt like somebody was stabbing me in the heart. That’s what it feels like when I see these photos.”
Demanding an Investigation
Nonetheless, the Hennepin County medical examiner labeled his death an “accidental drowning,” in spite of his family saying he knew how to swim.
“So they claimed he drowned, but he’s 6 feet tall and was found in like two or three feet of water,” Crews said. “[The report] says he had no life-threatening injuries, but we could see there’s a lot of injuries on his face. There was trauma to his face.”
“They said there was nothing on his body. There was. There were bruises on his body also.”
“And his dreads were pulled from his scalp,” Henderson added.
The body camera footage that Robbinsdale Police Department released six months after Azad’s mother requested it, along with the medical report, only raised more questions than answers for his loved ones, which prompted them to demand for an outside investigation on both the police department and medical examiner’s office, along with the removal of their K-9 units.
“While watching the body camera footage a number of discrepancies also stood out to us,” Azad’s family wrote in a statement. “We also noticed parts of the audio cut out for significant amounts of time. In addition, we noticed skips, pauses and freezes of the body camera footage, with multiple moments of blurriness, which leads us to believe that the original footage was tampered. We are concerned, because there were absolutely no time stamps on the footage we watched.”
“We want full transparency about the agencies who were called to secure the perimeter. … In light of the footage we received from Robbinsdale Police Department, we are also demanding footage from additional agencies involved: New Hope, Crystal, Plymouth, and Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department & State Trooper Patrol.”
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is conducting an independent investigation on the Robbinsdale Police Department as it looks into the family’s claims that Azad was brutally beaten to death by police, mauled by K-9s and thrown into the lake.
Remembering Azad
The departmental investigation comes months after Azad’s family attempted to gain coverage of his death through protests, vigils and social media posts, but it was ultimately his haunting autopsy photos that created enough noise to push for some of the police footage to be released and the investigation to occur. This was a decision that did not come lightly as they wanted Azad to be remembered for more than his mutilation.
“I met Khalil three and a half years ago,” Henderson recalled. “It was at one of our mutual friend’s parties. And honestly when I seen him, I just fell in love because his smile was so big. I wanted him when I first saw him.”
“A month passed and our mutual friend brought us together and then we just kind of hit it off. Like, it just worked for us. … He was just a good person. He was everything to me, honestly. He was just a good person all over.”
Milli also valued their friendship. “There were times where he didn’t even really have much, and he would offer me stuff, ” she said. “He was respectful. He was not a person that started things. Sometimes he would defuse if people had conflicts. He would never try to pick a side. He would try to be the mediator so he wouldn’t make the other person feel uncomfortable, or, you know what I mean? Like he was turning his back on you or something.”
“He was just a very good person. I don’t even know why this happened to him. This really just threw everybody off.”
“He was a very kindhearted person,” Lopez said. “Everybody that he cared about, anybody that came around him, he really cared for. He always just wanted to see anybody around him smile, like anybody, it [didn’t] matter if he just met you. He would really go above and beyond to, you know, make anyone around him happy.”
“Honestly, just being with him was always a good time. … He was always there for me.”
Memories of George Floyd
Minnesota police have been under a microscope since the 2020 death of George Floyd, a case of police brutality that ignited protests across the nation. The Minnesota Department of Human Rights would later find that a great racial disparity exists in how police handle Black individuals from a simple stop and search to use of excessive force and arrests.
Crews and Azad’s family are hoping that his death will further help spark a change in police treatment of Black people in Minnesota in addition to the consequences they face after another Black life is taken and a family is left to grieve without transparency.
“We want an independent investigation into any police-related shooting or incident resulting in death going back 20 years,” Crews said. “We want police to carry professional personal liability insurance. They don’t want bad drivers on the road; we don’t want bad cops on the force.” A GoFundMe page has been made in order to support Azad’s daughter and his family with obtaining a lawyer.
Azad’s family and loved ones will meet from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. CST Saturday to celebrate his life along the same shores where it ended.
Today would have been his 25th birthday.
Chrisleen Herard covers criminal justice for HUNewsService.com.
