The mother of Daunte Wright, who was fatally shot by a suburban Minneapolis police officer, said she was injured while she was briefly detained by one of the same department’s officers after she stopped to record an arrest of a person during a traffic stop.

Katie Wright said Thursday she was worried about what the Brooklyn Center officers might do to the person being handcuffed when she pulled over on Wednesday night. In April 2021, her 20-year-old son, who was Black, was killed during a traffic stop by Kim Potter, a white officer who said she confused her handgun for her Taser.

“All I was doing was my civic duty to pull over and make sure that those babies got home safe to their families because I don’t want what happened to me to happen to any other families,” Wright said.

Delivering good cheer — and 5 gallons of ketchup — Jill Biden thanked U.S. troops deployed to Romania as a check against Russian aggression for their service, as she began a four-day trip to Europe to see first hand the refugee crisis caused by Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

After flying overnight from Washington, the first lady arrived at Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania, near the Black Sea, in time to help serve Friday dinner to U.S. service members stationed there. Some of the several thousand U.S. troops President Joe Biden deployed to eastern Europe in the leadup to the Russia-Ukraine war were sent to the base, which is about 60 miles (100 kilometers) from Romania’s border with Ukraine.

Jill Biden served mac and cheese and baked potatoes for the troops — and encouraged them not to skip out on the greens — before greeting small groups of servicemembers at tables in the base dining facility. She delivered bottles of ketchup to the soldiers, responding to a shortage of the condiment on the base, eliciting cheers from the troops.

St. Thomas students gathered at Summit and Cretin avenues Thursday to protest a leaked Supreme Court draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark case that established a women’s ability to choose to have an abortion as a constitutional right.
Protests have taken the country by storm, including in front of the Minnesota Capitol Building, over the draft opinion written for the Dobb’s v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that was leaked on May 2; thousands have demanded that state governments take more proactive steps to protect reproductive rights.

“I think that a lot of states are threatening reproductive rights,” junior Amelia Reed said. “A lot of people think about Texas or other southern states, but this is happening all over the United States, including here in the Midwest.”

Mae Macfarlane can be reached at macf7507@stthomas.edu.