Man fatally shot by police in Minnesota; video investigated

A Minnesota officer fatally shot a man in a car with a woman and a child in the US, an official said.

Authorities are looking into whether the aftermath was livestreamed in a widely shared Facebook video, which shows a woman in a vehicle with a man whose shirt appears to be soaked in blood telling the camera "police just shot my boyfriend for no apparent reason."

St Anthony Police interim police chief Jon Mangseth said the incident began when an officer pulled over a vehicle around 9 PM yesterday in Falcon Heights, a St Paul suburb that Mangseth's department serves.

Mangseth said he did not have details about the reason for the traffic stop, but that at some point shots were fired. The man was struck but no one else was injured, he said.

As word of the shooting and video spread, relatives of the man joined scores of people who gathered at the scene of the shooting and outside the hospital where the man died and identified him as Philando Castile of St Paul, a 32-year-old cafeteria supervisor at a Montessori school.

Speaking to CNN early today, Castile's mother said she suspected she would never learn the whole truth about her son's death.

"I think he was just black in the wrong place," Valerie Castile said, adding that she had underlined to her children to that they must do what authorities tell them to do to survive. Police have not released details on the ethnicity or service record of the police officer involved but to say he has been placed on paid administrative leave.

"I know my son ... We know black people have been killed ... I always told them, whatever you do when you get stopped by police, comply, comply, comply."

Police use of force, particularly against minorities, has returned to the national spotlight since the video-recorded fatal shooting earlier this week of 37-year-old Alton Sterling by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

The US Justice Department yesterday launched a civil rights investigation into the shooting, which took place after Sterling, who was black, scuffled with two white police officers outside a convenience store.

Castile's cousin, Antonio Johnson, told the Star Tribune that he believed that because Philando Castile was a black man driving in Falcon Heights, a largely middle-class suburb, he "was immediately criminally profiled and he lost his life over it tonight.