In 2009, Toshira Garraway received a harrowing call about the death of her fiancé, Justin Teigen, who was found in a recycling bin after St. Paul police pulled him over for a traffic violation. Now, 16 years later, Garraway is still searching for answers, with the help of Minnesota Law’s Racial Justice Law Clinic.
Liliana Zaragoza, associate clinical professor of law and director of the clinic, together with several students, took on Garraway’s case, demanding access to third-party video footage of what happened before Teigen’s death. The case hinges on the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act.
In October 2025, third-year law student Kaylie Vasquez ’26, who is also a student director of the clinic, delivered an oral argument before Judge Edward Sheu in the Second Judicial District Court on behalf of Garraway, making the case that Garraway had properly submitted an information request and was unjustly denied access to the video footage by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner. This was Vasquez’s first time delivering an oral argument. Despite the short timeline — she had just weeks to prepare after the start of the semester — she felt confident in her preparation.
“This is what I would like to do in my career,” Vasquez says. “This experience really deepened my understanding of how the fight for racial justice implicates all areas of the law. The work that we’re doing here matters. It’s important for Ms. Garraway in her case, but it could also have larger implications for how people can access government data.”
The Racial Justice Law Clinic launched in 2022 in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and the subsequent uprisings in Minneapolis and across the country. Since then, the clinic has worked on a wide variety of cases, including an employment case for an Amazon warehouse worker, several eviction defense cases, and several successful habeas petitions on behalf of detained immigrants during Operation Metro Surge. The clinic also filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the Minneapolis NAACP and the Urban League-Twin Cities against the city’s police department over social media surveillance of the organizations and their staff.
Zaragoza emphasizes to students that racial justice issues exist in every area of the law. No matter what path students take after graduation, they can advocate for systemic change and make a difference in their respective communities.
“We really believe in an ethic of care, not just for movements and for potentially creating systemic change, but also for people,” Zaragoza says. “We’re not advocating for them, but with them. With Ms. Garraway, we are really trying as much as we can to effectuate what accountability looks like for her.”
For the students, the real-world experience of working on Garraway’s case has been eye-opening. Third-year law student Liddy Patterson ’26, who is also a student director of the clinic, has been working on the case for a year and a half, starting with the discovery process before assisting with the oral argument preparation this year. She says the experience has helped her understand how connected government data practices are to racial justice.
Student attorneys Cesar Plascencia ’27 and Briana Willson ’27 have also worked on the case, helping write the oral argument brief. Plascencia plans to work in labor law after graduation, but this experience has inspired him to consider incorporating a movement lawyering approach that leverages the legal system to bolster social movements.
These kinds of experiential learning opportunities are an important supplement to what students learn in the classroom, offering greater insight into the daily work of a lawyer.
“You can learn theories all day,” Willson says. “But there’s something very different about having to put together the final brief. … Those are the tiny pieces of being a lawyer that I hadn’t really considered, because when you read the cases in class and the decisions from judges, you don’t consider just how much work went into making that possible.”
Judge Sheu agreed with Vasquez’s oral argument and denied the defendant’s request for a summary judgment, paving the way for the Racial Justice Law Clinic to bring the case to trial in fall 2026.
The statute of limitations for filing a wrongful death lawsuit in Minnesota is only three years, barring a few exceptions. Since Teigen’s death, Garraway has founded a nonprofit called Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence to support communities grieving the loss of a loved one due to police violence. She says that, in her eyes, justice means allowing the truth to come to light.
“I can’t get Justin back, and I can’t change what was done to my family in denying us access,” Garraway says. “But hopefully this serves as a notice to the City of St. Paul and to the [Hennepin County] Medical Examiner’s Office that it is absolutely wrong to send families running in circles when they’re just trying to seek closure.”
Garraway says she’s grateful for the team’s help and is hopeful that she can finally bring the case to a close for herself and her family.