Amelia Schafer
ICT
RAPID CITY, South Dakota – A three-day trial over whether or not NDN Collective founder and chief executive officer Nicholas Tilsen had committed aggravated assault against a law enforcement officer in 2022 resulted in a mistrial.
The 12-person jury was unable to come to a unanimous decision on Tilsen’s three charges after deliberating for nearly six hours Wednesday afternoon. At 8:20 p.m. Mountain Time, a spokesperson from the Pennington County States Attorney’s office reported a hung jury resulting in a mistrial.
The State of South Dakota will have to decide whether to dismiss the charges against Tilsen or retry the case.
The state will be discussing matters over the next few days and come to a decision, the spokesperson said.
“I’m grateful for everyone who stood with me through the latest iteration of this lengthy legal battle – the support of my family, lawyers, spiritual leaders, medicine people, and community means everything to me,” Tilsen stated in a news release. “The fight is not over.”
Tilsen was charged with aggravated assault on a law enforcement officer and obstruction of law enforcement stemming from a 2022 incident in downtown Rapid City. The jury also had the option of finding Tilsen guilty of simple assault, rather than aggravated, if they felt his vehicle did not constitute a deadly weapon.
Tilsen took the stand Wednesday morning to recount his side of the story in a trial that has drawn dozens of elders and community members to the courthouse from across South Dakota and neighboring states.
Tilsen said that on June 11, 2022, he was driving back to NDN Collective headquarters where he was staying overnight following his son’s birthday party on the west side of Rapid City. At the time, Tilsen was living over an hour away on the Pine Ridge Reservation.
While driving down St. Joseph’s Street in downtown Rapid City, Tilsen testified that he saw a police officer speaking with a Native American man whom Tilsen said appeared to be homeless. The officer, Nicholas Glass, was conversing with the man at the intersection of St. Joseph’s and Seventh Street on the west side of the Rushmore Pawn building.
Tilsen, who said he intended to monitor Glass’s interaction with the man, circled the block until he drove northbound on Seventh Street, approaching a vacant parking space where the two men were speaking. Glass was standing inside or near the furthest left parking spot on the row and the Native man was standing on the curb, leaning on a parking meter, Tilsen told jurors.
Tilsen, who said he was unable to see where the officer was standing as his view was blocked by several parked vehicles, began to turn right into the parking spot. Not fully in the spot, Tilsen applied his vehicle’s brakes.
Glass, who had his back turned toward the street facing the pawn shop and the Native man, said he did not know Tilsen was behind him until he heard his engine rev, Glass testified Tuesday.
The Native man can be heard in Glass’s body camera video saying “Look out, you’re gonna get hit by a truck.”
Glass turned to face Tilsen for a second before turning back toward the man.
“I’m not moving,” Glass said in the recording played for the courtroom several times throughout the trial.
Tilsen said he took Glass’s lack of reaction as an indication that it was okay for him to continue to pull into the parking spot.
The video showed that after Glass turned away from Tilsen, Tilsen’s vehicle can be seen abruptly jolting forward slightly to the right of Glass, stopping within one to two feet of his body. While surveillance and body-cam footage showed Tilsen’s vehicle tires pointed right, away from the officer, the state argued that as the charge wasn’t attempted assault but rather the intention of instilling fear, and that it didn’t matter which direction he was moving.
Tilsen testified on Wednesday that he was “surprised” by how his truck, a 2016 Dodge Ram Rebel, abruptly jolted forward.
“It had a little more juice than I expected,” he said.
The lurching/accelerating aspect of the incident was indicated by the state as being the grounds for Tilsen’s assault charge.
Afterwards, Glass radioed for backup and said that he had Tilsen at the scene. Within seconds, several officers arrived on scene, all of whom testified throughout the trial as to what they had seen.
“I thought I was going to die,” Glass testified Tuesday.
The officers testified that Tilsen was let go from the scene that night so as not to cause a scene as a small crowd had begun to gather. Tilsen had refused to exit his truck when law enforcement requested him to, saying he was afraid for his life.
“I felt alarmed,” Tilsen said. “I was surrounded by three officers who were all armed. I was definitely in fear of what could happen. We hear a lot of things in our community [about police violence].”
The state said that the jury could find his refusal to exit his vehicle as grounds for the obstruction charge.
Under South Dakota law, attempting to put an officer in fear of bodily injury can be charged as assault. The aggravated assault charge hinged on whether or not the jury felt Tilsen’s vehicle constituted a deadly weapon. If the jury found that his vehicle did not constitute a deadly weapon, but found that Tilsen had intentionally put the officer in fear of bodily injury regardless, he could be found guilty of simple assault.
Both Tilsen and Glass’s character, truthfulness and overall recollection of the incident were called into question during cross-examination.
During Glass’s testimony, defense attorneys questioned why he stopped the Native man in the first place. Glass had previously testified under oath during a June 2025 evidentiary hearing that the man was jaywalking and “darting in and out of traffic” on Seventh Street, during which he was nearly hit by a vehicle.
The defense, however, pointed out that a surveillance video from the Rushmore Pawn shop showed the man crossing the street within the crosswalk when it was safe to do so. Defense pointed to the incident as giving credit to Tilsen’s claim that he feared the man was being harassed by law enforcement.
Defense also questioned why Glass was seen telling the responding officers that he had to “jump out of the way” of Tilsen’s vehicle, when surveillance footage does not indicate he moved at all prior to walking in front of Tilsen’s vehicle to document the license plate.
During Tilsen’s cross-examination, the state questioned his feelings regarding law enforcement and why he told responding officers at the scene that he witnessed Glass harassing the Native man when he had not.
Olivia Siglin, prosecutor and senior deputy states attorney for the Pennington County State’s Attorney’s Office, questioned Tilsen on his fundraising efforts relating to his legal battle with the state and recent appearance on NDN Collective’s “LANDBACK For the People” podcast in which he told a different account of the incident than the one he had provided in his testimony.
The podcast, which was played for the jury, depicts Tilsen stating in the podcast that he had a conversation with Glass and had directly witnessed him harassing the man. Siglin then questioned Tilsen on why he told a different story in his testimony, to which Tilsen responded that he and Glass had exchanged words and perhaps he misspoke when he said he directly witnessed harassment.
Tilsen also said the podcast was recorded two weeks ago before he was able to review surveillance footage.
During closing arguments Wednesday afternoon, Siglin accused Tilsen of painting a false narrative about the incident in order to garner sympathy and donations from the community and “save face.” Siglin showed the jury NDN Collective’s legal fund website, referencing the first two sentences of Tilsen’s legal fund call to action.
The website claims that Tilsen had witnessed the Native man being harassed and assaulted by Rapid City Police Department, prompting Tilsen to pull over and watch. Tilsen said that he himself did not write the statement.
“He knew the truth wouldn’t earn him sympathies or donations, so he rewrote it,” Siglin said during closing arguments. “What were his motivations in making that statement?”
John Murphy, one of Tilsen’s attorneys, said during closing statements that a majority of the state’s argument hinged on Glass’s feelings during the incident rather than the actual facts. Murphy said this lack of facts prompted the addition of the state’s simple assault charge on Jan. 7.
“This case is about facts, not feelings,” he said. “That’s the cold hard truth, that’s the reality.”
Murphy argued that the state had not provided sufficient evidence of Tilsen’s actual intent or that he had purposely threatened or instilled fear in Glass.
“As you saw repeatedly from the videos… Officer Glass did not move an inch to avoid being hit,” he said. “Why not? Because my client had turned the steering wheel steeply to the right.”
As the incident occurred nearly four years ago, both said their memories of the night’s events were not perfect. Both also commented that the footage presented in court was not a full depiction of the events, particularly the pawn shop footage.
The pawn shop video, taken at a downward angle, was difficult for numerous witnesses to decipher when asked to do so by attorneys.
One witness, Michael Dvoryak, a bystander who witnessed the incident, couldn’t point himself out in the footage until he saw someone moving toward Tilsen’s truck and yelling, at which point Dvoryak said, “Well, that must be me.”
Dvoryak testified he had just exited a bar downtown and was walking home when he witnessed the incident, prompting him to run over to Tilsen’s truck and “intervene.”
The Native man at the center of the dispute was not present for the trial. The Pennington County State’s Attorney’s Office did subpoena him but were unable to locate him, a spokesperson told ICT.
After the interaction, Glass testified that the man was taken to a detox facility. A video of the man being taken into the facility by Glass was entered as evidence but ultimately barred from being presented to the jury.