Moriarty calls out police failures in Lussier case

Thank you all for being here today. I'm Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty and I'm here with Deputy Chief Charlie Adams and members of our staff. In February 2024, Allison Luscher was found dead in her apartment. Due to some assumptions about the cause of death and a lack of investigation in the immediate aftermath, there were significant obstacles to developing a case for charging. The investigative response to Allison's death has been the subject of an audit ordered by the Minneapolis City Council. I have said numerous times that our work to try and develop the case would continue with the goal of gathering enough evidence to one day make a charging decision. Through the tireless work of our staff, our law enforcement partners, including the Minneapolis Police Department, that day is today. We have filed second-degree murder charges against Charles Foss in the death of Allison Luscher. When the charge was originally submitted to our office in June of 2024, it was not chargeable. But our team of prosecutors, investigators, and victim witness staff developed a plan to thoroughly investigate Allison's death. We were able to follow through on that plan with the collaboration of the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office and the Minneapolis Police Department. I want to specifically highlight two items. First, I want to thank the community. Your demand for accountability kept Allison in the spotlight and directly assisted us in conducting additional investigation. There has historically been little trust among the Native community that the system sees them and is committed to holding individuals who harm them accountable, and for good reason. I'm grateful to those in the community who trusted us throughout this investigation and worked with a government entity that has often let them down. Second, I want to call attention to the rising tide of domestic violence in our society. We are seeing an increase in reports of domestic violence. We have partnered with the Minneapolis Police Department to improve the response to gone-on arrivals. are cases where the person who's been allegedly committing the assault is gone when the police arrived. MPD has dedicated a team to quickly arresting appropriate people who are gone on arrival. We also worked with the City of Minneapolis to take over outreach to victims on gone on arrivals that appear to be felony level. That person will spend some time embedded within the Minneapolis Police Department. Having said that, I wish I was not standing here announcing charges in another case that involves a death from domestic violence. The charges announced today will not bring Allison back. The harm has been done. While we're intent on holding Mr. Foss accountable, we must move upstream and focus on prevention. This should not have happened to Allison, and both the legal system and our society must react to prevent it from happening again. Thank you. Questions? Do you know much about the manner of death? I don't know all the background, but what do you, what was suspected injuries that time? So the question is about the manner of death. The medical examiner is very clear about the cause of death, and I want to be very specific about this. Alison Luscher died of an acute subdural hematoma, not a drug overdose. She died of an acute subdural hematoma. The question, which is the manner of death, was that homicidal or accidental, could not be determined because of the length of the time that elapsed between when this happened and when Allison's body was found. So the ME says at this point they can't determine the manner of death. But I want to be clear, she died of an acute subdural hematoma. And the symptoms or the result of that would have happened to her very quickly. So her death very quickly followed the subdural hematoma. So I will point people to the complaint that's been filed. I think we lay out a very clear timeline, which is really important here and was part of the additional investigation that we had tremendous help with to narrow down that area of time or that length of time to less than an hour where Mr. Foss had talked to her and planned to go over there and when she stopped responding to her sister. What evidence does your office have that it didn't have in the months that followed? What evidence do we have now? Yeah, the question is what evidence do we have now that we didn't have? Due to the help of community members, we were able to talk to witnesses that were willing to talk to us that really helped us understand the depth of the domestic violence that occurred to Alison Blucher. The other piece of evidence I just mentioned, at the beginning, because the medical examiner didn't know or couldn't tell us how the subdural hematoma happened, we at the beginning were left with a very large period of time in which she was last heard from and when she was found. We're talking about days there. But due to the perseverance of the investigators in this case, we were able to find witnesses that narrowed down that time frame to less than an hour. After this happened, he went to a friend's house, and he had Allison's cell phone. And so there were forensics done on that cell phone, and they could clearly see that Allison's sister had been trying to call her at, I think, about 6.05, and she was not answering. So there is that evidence. There's also, as I said, tremendous evidence of domestic violence that was inflicted upon Alison Luscher by Mr. Foss. But is there any DNA, anything that is directly linked to him? So the question is, is there any DNA? DNA would not be helpful to us because they were in a sort of relationship, a domestic violence, which consisted of domestic violence. So if we found his DNA in her apartment, that would tell us nothing. kind of weapon, the ME will talk about how a subdural hematoma happens. That is not something that's necessarily inflicted by a weapon. That might be a blow to the head that causes the subdural hematoma. So from the beginning, we were not thinking that any weapon would be involved. What we had to do was narrow down the timeframe where we could figure out who was with her Because we know the symptoms would have, the onset of the symptoms would have been pretty immediate. So after that was inflicted, she would not have been alive much longer. And we have been able to do that with the assistance of MPD and the Sheriff's Office. Yes? It also highlights the failures that were part of this case. Family had been adamant from the start that Mr. Foss is responsible. I know, I imagine you connect with family, and maybe Mr. Adams can address this too, but a message to the community to move forward and prevent these failures from happening again? The question is about the failures in this investigation at the beginning, and I know we've both connected with the family. What I'm going to say about this is this. This is a huge step forward, not only in this case, but in terms of gaining trust in the community. I think good leaders acknowledge when something went wrong, and they dedicate themselves to making sure that things improve in the future. And I would give Deputy Chief Adams much credit for coming in and working with our team and making some of the changes that we both felt would lead to more immediate arrests and better attention to these types of cases. Would you like to? Charlie Adams, Deputy Chief of Investigations. Now, Commander Zimmerman and former Chief Gators had connected with the family. I haven't because I just got this role a couple months ago. But the changes I've made in domestic violence is we've added, I took our community navigators and made them all domestic navigators. We also took the internal group, which is the city attorney, the Hennepin County attorney, and some of our advocates, and we all formed our internal group. The thing is we have to let the people who work with our victims daily be the ones to make the decisions right not the brass not other folks right so this group has been together for the last couple months they've made some great strides we have the 14 uh 14 day GOA list which tremendously helps us to get these guys we have 14 days to get them we also we're going to use our units for the one violent ones like somebody put a gun to some uh a victim's head or choked them we got an agreement where we i will send out my apprehension team to make those arrest right away and that's something we haven't had in the past so we're most definitely with with the help of our our internal group has made great strides we took our risk assessment took it down from three pages down to one page because victims were complaining about the length of time we're constantly answering the same questions over the officers were complaining about it too so we're making those changes and it continues to evolve but i think we've had a couple of really bad domestic cases, GOA cases that we've actually went after, sent the teams after and we're able to get these guys into custody. Even some of these guys turned themselves in because our team's been after them. So that's some of the improvements we've made, but we're going to continue to make more improvements. Gone on arrival. Gone on arrival. So they're not there when we get there. No, I will be really candid about when we got this case. Our team, and I think all of us would have said we weren't quite sure we were ever going to get to this point but we were also sure that we were going to persevere and we were going to overturn every stone possible because we wanted to do that for the family we wanted to be able to tell them we did everything that we possibly could to find evidence to see whether we could charge we didn't know what was going to happen and as you said this has been going on for quite a while there are witnesses here that really don't trust government and it took a long time to be able first of all the community and the family put us in touch with them otherwise I don't know that they ever would have been found and then we were able MPD was able to have those conversations that takes time you have to meet people where they are go to where they are find it I mean many people don't have phones so you have to figure out how to communicate with them to be able to track them down so I will say it wasn't one piece of evidence. We had check-ins every once in a while to see, hey, where are we at? And it just seemed to have come together given, and I would point you to page three of our complaint, the top of the page there, which really outlines some of the key evidence and the witnesses that really came together here. We were not going to go ahead if we did not have proof beyond a reasonable doubt. We're here, we're confident about that, and we're ready to move forward. So question is, without the family, would we be at this point? I will say we never forgot this case. We never forgot about Allison. We never wavered in trying to get her justice. What I will say is I don't think we would have had access to some of the witnesses that were critical, but for the family. So I think their continued advocacy and continuing, you know, it's a broader issue than just Ms. Lusher, right? The system needs to do better. Society needs to do better on domestic violence, particularly in the Native American community. We need to be focusing on how do we prevent that. So their advocacy has been fantastic and I think has really pushed many different agencies in the right direction. using drugs, as you said. Is that hard enough officer when they, oh, it's just someone who's on drugs and not take it as seriously? I mean, how do you weigh that? How do you balance that when you're on the street with someone who's been a victim of a crime and they happen to be addicted to a substance? As some of you know, I've spent 10 years in homicide as a homicide investigator. And one thing, that's my victim, right? So, I mean, I've had a victim at drug use. We didn't even put it in the complaint because that's just not part of why that person had died. So just to say that, I would never do that as a homicide investigator, put anything out there about my victim. Even if it's true, I wouldn't do that. It's about solving this crime, right, bringing closure to the family and respecting that victim and the family. So I don't think it makes it any less when the officer's out there on the street. you know, if they, like, I was an inspector at Northside, Fourth Precinct. We have a huge addiction issue up there, and people are like, why don't you arrest them? I'm like, no, they have issues. We get them help, right? And I'm quoted saying I don't arrest addicts, right? Because they need help, right? So I never play on that person's addiction or if they're alcoholic or whatever, if that makes sense. I don't know for the department, but that may be how you operate it. Some pretty damning comments about Allison's drug use when she was found. What has happened since to address it within the department for all investigators when they make it to the scene? So, you know, that was the past administration that made that comment. This is a new administration, and I'm just telling you from my standpoint, what I do as an investigator and what the folks I work with in North Minneapolis, my officers, they know what the stance is on addiction and not criminalizing people because they're addicts, if that answers your question. you know usually what we'll do if it's if there's some odd signs we will make that call and have our 710 squad come out and look at it who people are professional can look at the the scene uh There's not really a new protocol. If a sergeant gets to the scene and if there's anything suspicious, we're going to call. Call the investigator in. We'll call Commander Zimmerman to come in. If it's not, we'll call the medical examiner in. They come in and they look at it and they make that determination to take the body. So the protocol is still the same, but it should be a supervisor should respond to those calls to make sure we have that additional expertise to look at. Two more questions. I did want to follow up to part of your question. We did see this in the previous administration, and I'll speak very candidly about it. The previous chief insisted that Alison Lusher died of a drug overdose. He said that a number of times in public. That was not true. That's not on the death certificate. It's not anything that the medical examiner ever said. And we have seen a new approach from this administration. um we've i reached out immediately after the chief left to Katie Blackwell to talk about some of the needs and domestic violence and we met within days so we have seen much more of a willingness on part of MPD to really address these issues but i do want to say too many people struggle with drugs many people take allison lucher did not cause her death there is absolutely nothing about the fact that there were drugs in her system that makes anything different about the fact that she died of an acute subdural hematoma, and I think that's important. Yes, this is Jen White, the director of our community affairs division, and this is Deanna Smith, who heads our victim witness staff. What was the process going forward to get witness number two to tell you on February 8th that they witnessed Chuck Voss in a wig, essentially admitting to them that he killed Allison DeScher? A question is about what was the process of getting one of the witnesses to talk to us, the one who said that Mr. Voss was in a wig and acknowledged to killing Alison Luscher. I think you're right, it is a process. And I think that process started with community and family who were aware that there was a lot of information in the community. People were talking about this. Mr. Voss was talking about this. The issue was how did we, as government essentially, build relationships with people who really didn't want to have anything to do with us, who didn't trust that maybe we would do anything with this, and also who might have been afraid of Mr. Voss and maybe didn't want to talk with us. So I credit investigators from our staff, we had investigators working on this too, to build relationships and having, as I said, community and family connect us to them, and hopefully give them some sense of we really were serious about this and we wanted to get justice for Allison. No, he is in prison on another offense. He will be brought here probably early next week and will make a first appearance. Any other questions? Yeah, there is a question. Yeah, I think we all sort of agree that that might be the best path forward. I'm just trying to find it in my phone here. This is a question from my colleague, Matt Suffolk, and it is in regards to your office's cooperation in the Freddie case. Is this a question about the TUI litigation? Yes, it is. So I understand people have questions about that. I really want to focus on domestic violence today. I would encourage people to follow up with Daniel, and we can talk about whether we have anything in addition to what our statement is. But I just want to emphasize to you, domestic violence is a critical issue here. And we need to improve on that. And so I don't want to detract from Allison Luscher and her life and the fact that we are here today with charges. To follow up on that, about the pilot study that was done last summer with MPB, there was a three-month pilot study. I don't know that there was a lot of information that came out after that As we see that I believe Violence Free Minnesota sort of had some of the responsibility in bringing those partners together. Can you talk about or talk more about what then these cases look like, Yvonne, in the rival situation? What more has changed? You know, I'm going to be 100% honest with you. So we did do the pilot. It started in the fourth precinct of my precinct, and then we did it in the third precinct. When I took over, we discovered that the questions that the group that had wanted the pilot study done was not the questions that got to our navigators. So the information we had was inadequate. I'm not going to give those numbers out because it's not fair to us, to the victims, and to the citizens. So what we did, I said, we changed the risk assessment. We're going to do a three-month assessment, and at the end of that assessment, we will give that outside group that information. So, like I said, we did the pilot, but the numbers are not going to be correct. Yeah. Any last questions? Thank you.