Ricky Cobb II

Ricky Cobb II was a 33 year old Black man from the Minneapolis area whose death during a traffic stop by a Minnesota State Patrol trooper became one of the most closely watched police shooting cases in the state since the killing of George Floyd. He was not a public figure before his death. He became known to the country only because of the manner in which he died and the years of legal proceedings that followed, proceedings that were still being fought out in federal court more than three years later.

On the morning of July 31, 2023, two Minnesota State Patrol troopers pulled Cobb over on Interstate 94 in Minneapolis after noticing that the taillights on the Ford Fusion he was driving were not working. The troopers learned that Ramsey County authorities wanted Cobb taken into custody and asked him to step out of the car. Body camera video later released by investigators showed Cobb repeatedly declining to get out while the troopers stood at his open doors. As the car began to move forward, Trooper Ryan Londregan fired twice into Cobb's torso. The vehicle continued forward and crashed into a concrete barrier a short distance away. Cobb was pronounced dead at the scene.

The shooting set off immediate protests and calls for accountability in Minneapolis, a city still marked by the 2020 killing of George Floyd. Cobb's family, including his twin brother Rashad Cobb and his mother Nyra Fields-Miller, demanded that the troopers involved be fired and criminally charged. In January 2024, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged Londregan with second degree unintentional murder, first degree assault and second degree manslaughter, saying at the time that deadly force had not been necessary and that Cobb should still be alive. Months later, however, Moriarty's office dismissed the charges, citing new evidence that she said made it impossible to prove the case against Londregan beyond a reasonable doubt, a decision the Cobb family strongly condemned as a capitulation to political pressure.

Separately, Cobb's family pursued a federal civil rights lawsuit against Londregan and a second trooper at the scene, Brett Seide, alleging unreasonable seizure and excessive force. A federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that the troopers were entitled to qualified immunity because Cobb could not show that Londregan had violated a clearly established right when he decided to shoot. A three judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit later upheld that dismissal. The family's lawyers signaled that only the Supreme Court could still revive the case.

That chapter closed on November 9, 2026, when the Supreme Court declined to hear the family's appeal, part of a broader list of orders released from the justices' November 6 conference in which the Court turned away more than two hundred petitions without comment. The denial leaves the Eighth Circuit's ruling, and the qualified immunity protection it granted the troopers, as the final word in the civil case. For Cobb's family and supporters, the news reopened the grief and anger of 2023 and renewed debate over the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which shields police officers from many civil lawsuits unless a plaintiff can point to an earlier case with nearly identical facts.