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During his speech at the Republican National Convention, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota talked about “rioters” in Minneapolis after the death of George Floyd in 2020, and misleadingly said that Vice President Kamala Harris “freed” from jail one of “the criminals” who “went on to murder a man” in neighboring St. Paul. Emmer is distorting the facts.
The congressman was referring to Shawn Michael Tillman, who in March was sentenced to prison for a 2022 murder. But he was not a protester Harris encouraged the public to help get out of jail in 2020.
“When Minneapolis was in flames and businesses were in ruins, Kamala Harris encouraged and enabled the criminals and the rioters,” Emmer, the House majority whip, said in his July 16 remarks. “She even promoted a fund to release the criminals from jail. It doesn’t get reported much in our media, but one criminal Kamala Harris freed in Minneapolis went on to murder a man in St. Paul, Minnesota.”
As we’ve written, Harris did use her social media accounts in June 2020 to encourage donations to a nonprofit, the Minnesota Freedom Fund, “to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota” after the death of George Floyd, who was killed by a police officer the month prior. The nonprofit, founded in 2016, pays the bail amount — which is set by a judge — for individuals who would otherwise be unable to afford to secure their release from jail while they await their day in court.
After Harris and other public figures promoted the organization, MFF “raised nearly $40 million in donations from over one million individual donors in 2020,” Greg Lewin, the organization’s then-interim executive director, told us in an email for our 2020 article. He said that $1.5 million was set aside to financially assist protesters in Minnesota who were “fighting their cases,” but the nonprofit said many of those who were arrested while protesting “weren’t detained and instead were given citations then released, have been released with no bail, or held with no bail.”
When we heard Emmer’s convention remarks live on July 16, we reached out to his congressional office that night and asked for the name of the person he claimed that Harris allegedly “freed” from jail. We initially did not get a response. When we followed up on July 17, a spokesperson for Emmer’s reelection campaign replied to an email with a link to an August 2022 Fox News article about Shawn Michael Tillman.
The article mentioned that a Minnesota news outlet reported that month that Tillman, after being bailed out of jail by the Minnesota Freedom Fund on April 29, 2022, was arrested three weeks later for the murder of a man in St. Paul, later identified as Demitri Ellis-Strong. Nearly two years later, in March 2024, Tillman was convicted of first- and second-degree murder, as well as unlawful possession of a firearm, and sentenced to life in prison.
But prior to his April 2022 release, Tillman had been jailed on misdemeanor charges of indecent exposure, according to news reports and the MFF, which said it paid $2,000 in bail support for his release. There’s no indication that his arrest had anything to do with the protests, or riots, following Floyd’s death two years prior.
So, contrary to what Emmer suggested on stage at the RNC, Tillman is not one of the protesters whom Harris asked the public to help four years ago by donating to the Minnesota Freedom Fund.
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