On the evening of May 2, 2010, 22-year-old Christopher Javier Capps of Rapid City, South Dakota, was shot multiple times and later died at Rapid City Regional Hospital. The shooting was carried out by Pennington County Sheriff’s Deputy David Olson, then a nearly five-year department veteran. Authorities say Olson was responding to an assault report and encountered Capps being pursued; Olson’s account is that Capps charged at him with a knife, prompting him to shoot. Capps’s family strongly disputes that version, saying he was unarmed and fleeing people who had been chasing him. An autopsy found one of the five bullets entered through Capps’s back; no weapon was recovered at the scene.

Christopher, a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe, graduated from Stevens High School in 2006 and had been accepted to the University of South Dakota – Vermillion to study computer animation. His parents, Jerry and Jaylene Capps, said he owned a new touring bike and denied claims he tried to steal a bicycle; they planned a wrongful death lawsuit. The state Division of Criminal Investigation and the attorney general cleared Olson, but a federal appeals court later ruled that qualified immunity was questionable given the conflicting accounts and allowed the family’s lawsuit to proceed to trial.

Does anyone have information about Christopher’s last movements that evening or witnessed the encounter near where he was chased?