Exclusive : Weeks before she was shot dead by Minneapolis police the Australian, also known as Justine Ruszczyk, was filmed reuniting a family of stranded ducks

When reporters asked friends and family for stories about Justine Damond, many of them asked: “Have you heard about the ducks?”

Three weeks before she was shot dead by police Damond, a 40-year-old Australian who had changed her surname from Ruszczyk in anticipation of her wedding, climbed into a storm drain and rescued a group of ducklings near her home in Minneapolis by gathering them in the folds of her skirt. The way her friends tell it, this incident was special but not atypical.

Justine Damond death: US investigators say 'loud sound' may have sparked police shooting Read more

By chance, the rescue happened at a corner in the Linden Hills neighbourhood, outside the home of photojournalist Angela Jimenez, who filmed it. After Damond died Jimenez sought and received permission from Damond’s family to release the footage and this has been shared by the Guardian.

Damond, originally from Sydney, was on her way to teach a meditation class at the Lake Harriet Spiritual Centre when she saw the trapped ducklings. Jimenez remembers that two teenage boys had spotted the ducks first, but that Damond was the first to jump in the sewer, less than two minutes after she arrived.

On the video she is shown gathering the ducklings and persuading the mother of the ducklings to walk over the road for a family reunion. She can be heard telling neighbours: “She might just need to chill a bit … I’m going to let you guys be the duck rescuers, are you guys OK with them?”

And then she heads off to work, with the family of ducks reunited.

“That was beautiful,” says a neighbour.

“Guess what, I just rescued eight ducklings,” Damond later texted the centre’s administrator, Nancy Coune. “The mother duke was distraught and I climbed and pulled them all in my skirt … There was this moment when I think they realised I was there to help and they just started jumping to my lap, I was in bliss!”

On 15 July Damond called police, fearing that a sexual assault was taking place in an alley near her home. Police said the partner of the officer who reportedly killed Damond, Mohamed Noor, was startled by a “loud sound”. Damond died in her pyjamas. A mobile phone was found nearby.

After her death Coune said: “We’ve come together. We’re teetering back and forth between tragic heartsick to outrage, to trying to understand it, to really knowing that there is a greater purpose and that at some point we will come to terms with this ... people are struggling here.”

Damond’s partner Don Damond said: “Our hearts are broken and we are utterly devastated by the loss of Justine. It is difficult to fathom how to go forward without her in my life.”