Ms. Damond, 40, a yoga and meditation instructor who was engaged to be married, had called 911 twice that July night to report what she feared was a sexual assault happening outside her home in an affluent part of Minneapolis. Officer Noor and his partner, Officer Matthew Harrity, arrived minutes later.
The two officers were driving through an alley near Ms. Damond’s home with their emergency lights off, state investigators said, when Officer Harrity reported being startled by a loud noise. Moments later, Officer Noor, the passenger in the police car, fired a shot through the cruiser’s open driver’s side window, fatally striking Ms. Damond.
Neither officer’s body camera was turned on, and there is no known video of the shooting.
In a statement released by their lawyer, Robert Bennett, members of Ms. Damond’s family applauded the charging decision and called it “one step toward justice for this iniquitous act.”
“We remain hopeful that a strong case will be presented by the prosecutor, backed by verified and detailed forensic evidence, and that this will lead to a conviction,” the family’s statement said. “No charges can bring our Justine back. However, justice demands accountability for those responsible for recklessly killing the fellow citizens they are sworn to protect, and today’s actions reflect that.”
For months, the authorities released little information about what led to the gunfire, and Officer Noor declined to speak to investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, who were asked by the city to review the shooting. The state agency finished its investigation in mid-September and handed over its findings to Mr. Freeman’s office.
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Ms. Damond’s death happened a month after a police officer was acquitted of manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a motorist in nearby Falcon Heights. It renewed debate in the Minneapolis region about how officers use force and treat residents. Protesters marched, demanded policy changes and at one point shouted over the mayor at the time, Betsy Hodges, during a news conference.
For years, activists in Minnesota have protested police shootings, including many high-profile cases in which black men were killed. Some of the same activists demonstrated after the shooting of Ms. Damond, who was white, and suggested that her death might galvanize some white people who had previously been silent about police misconduct.
Officer Noor, a member of the area’s large Somali immigrant community, began patrolling the district in southwest Minneapolis 14 months before the shooting. He was the first Somali officer to be stationed in that area, and was seen as a cultural bridge to a community that has at times had tensions with the police.
After the shooting, Ms. Hodges moved quickly to dismiss the Minneapolis police chief, Janee Harteau, and the police department announced new rules requiring body cameras to be turned on in more situations.
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“Why don’t we have footage from body cameras?” Ms. Hodges said in July. “Why were they not activated? We all want answers to those questions.”
Ms. Hodges, who faced criticism for her handling of police shootings, was defeated for re-election in November and left office in January. Don Damond, Ms. Damond’s fiancé, endorsed the winning mayoral candidate, Jacob Frey, and said that Ms. Hodges’s efforts to improve the Police Department “were too little, too late.”
Activists demanded the swift filing of criminal charges against Officer Noor, but Mr. Freeman resisted the requests, saying he needed to wait for the findings of the investigation.
“We have received some emails and phone calls from members of the community demanding that we charge the officer immediately and ascribing all kinds of nefarious reasons as to why we haven’t done so,” Mr. Freeman wrote in August.
In December, Mr. Freeman was videotaped at a labor union gathering saying that investigators in the case “haven’t done their job,” that Officer Harrity’s statement was unhelpful, and that he did not have enough information to make a charging decision.
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“I’ve got to have the evidence, and I don’t have it yet,” Mr. Freeman said in the video. “And let me just say, it’s not my fault.”
Mr. Freeman later apologized to the state investigative agency and said, “I was wrong to discuss both the agency’s work and what discussions we are having internally at the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office.”
Mr. Freeman initially said he expected to make a charging decision in 2017. But he reversed course on Dec. 28, saying that “review of the case will not be rushed” and that the investigation would continue into the new year.
Prosecutors often face difficulty securing convictions against police officers involved in shootings. In the Falcon Heights case, Officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted in June by jurors in a neighboring county for the fatal 2016 shooting of Philando Castile. Officers in Oklahoma, Wisconsin and Missouri were acquitted last year in trials over fatal shootings.
Minneapolis police records released after the shooting showed that Officer Noor had been the subject of three citizen complaints during his short career. Details about the incidents were not released. A day before the shooting of Ms. Damond, a lawsuit accusing Officer Noor and two colleagues of misconduct was filed in federal court.
Ms. Damond’s death added to a longstanding, tense debate over police conduct in Minnesota, where the shooting of Mr. Castile in Falcon Heights prompted large protests, and where demonstrators in Minneapolis camped for days outside a police station in 2015 after an officer shot and killed Jamar Clark, an unarmed black man.
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