A white police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was charged with murder on Tuesday after a video surfaced showing him shooting in the back and killing an apparently unarmed black man while the man ran away.
The officer, Michael T. Slager, 33, said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday. A video, however, shows the officer firing eight times as the man, Walter L. Scott, 50, fled. The North Charleston mayor announced the state charges at a news conference Tuesday evening.
The shooting came on the heels of high-profile instances of police officers’ using lethal force in New York, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. The deaths have set off a national debate over whether the police are too quick to use force, particularly in cases involving black men.
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The shooting unfolded after Officer Slager stopped the driver of a Mercedes-Benz with a broken taillight, according to police reports. Mr. Scott ran away, and Officer Slager chased him into a grassy lot that abuts a muffler shop. He fired his Taser, an electronic stun gun, but it did not stop Mr. Scott, according to police reports.
[Paste the following on Google to watch the officer’s dashcam (CNN presented) video of Slager and Scott’s initial conversation and Scott’s initial flight]
Dash cam shows moments before shooting of Walter Scott ...
Moments after the struggle, Officer Slager reported on his radio: “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser,” according to police reports.
But the video, which was taken by a bystander and provided to The New York Times by the Scott family’s lawyer, presents a different account. The video begins in the vacant lot, apparently moments after Officer Slager fired his Taser. Wires, which carry the electrical current from the stun gun, appear to be extending from Mr. Scott’s body as the two men tussle and Mr. Scott turns to run.
Something — it is not clear whether it is the stun gun — is either tossed or knocked to the ground behind the two men, and Officer Slager draws his gun, the video shows. When the officer fires, Mr. Scott appears to be 15 to 20 feet away and fleeing. He falls after the last of eight shots.
Officer Slager
The officer then runs back toward where the initial scuffle occurred and picks something up off the ground. Moments later, he drops an object near Mr. Scott’s body, the video shows (Schmidt and Apuzzo 1-2).
Slager had been patrolling North Charleston’s Remount Road on that hazy Saturday morning. His department had been working for years to tamp down crime. They employed “pretext stops” in which officers looked for small violations as opportunities to pull over drivers and stop pedestrians in hopes of nabbing hardened criminals and taking guns and drugs off the streets (Yee 2).
Mr. Scott had been arrested about 10 times, mostly for failing to pay child support or show up for court hearings, according to The Post and Courier newspaper of Charleston. He was arrested in 1987 on an assault and battery charge and convicted in 1991 of possession of a bludgeon, the newspaper reported. Mr. Scott’s brother, Anthony, said he believed Mr. Scott had fled from the police on Saturday because he owed child support.
“He has four children; he doesn’t have some type of big violent past or arrest record,” said Chris Stewart, a lawyer for Mr. Scott’s family. “He had a job; he was engaged. He had back child support and didn’t want to go to jail for back child support.”
Mr. Stewart said the coroner had told him that Mr. Scott was struck five times — three times in the back, once in the upper buttocks and once in the ear — with at least one bullet entering his heart. It is not clear whether Mr. Scott died immediately. (The coroner’s office declined to make the report available to The Times.)
Police reports say that officers performed CPR and delivered first aid to Mr. Scott. The video shows that for several minutes after the shooting, Mr. Scott remained face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. A second officer arrives, puts on blue medical gloves and attends to Mr. Scott, but is not shown performing CPR. As sirens wail in the background, a third officer later arrives, apparently with a medical kit, but is also not seen performing CPR.
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Mr. Scott’s brother said his mother had called him on Saturday, telling him that his brother had been shot by a Taser after a traffic stop. “You may need to go over there and see what’s going on,” he said his mother told him. When he arrived at the scene of the shooting, officers told him that his brother was dead, but he said they had no explanation for why. “This just doesn’t sound right,” he said in an interview. “How do you lose your life at a traffic stop” (Schmidt and Apuzzo 3).
Feidin Santana, the bystander who captured on video North Charleston police officer Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott in the back, says his life has "changed" following the incident and he remains cautious and "scared."
"I say life changed in a matter of seconds. I never thought this would happen, that I would be a witness," he told TODAY's Matt Lauer in an exclusive interview Thursday. "I'm still scared."
Santana said he "definitely" believes Slager saw him when, at one point in the video, he looked his way.
"I recorded the video so that maybe he can feel that someone is there," he said. "There were just the three of us in that moment. I couldn’t tell what was going to happen, so I just wanted him to know that he's not by himself."
On Wednesday, Santana, 23, revealed himself as the man behind the video in an interview wih NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt.
"Before I started recording, they were down on the floor. I remember the police [officer] had control of the situation," Santana told Holt. "He had control of Scott. And Scott was trying just to get away from the Taser. But like I said, he never used the Taser against the cop."
"As you can see in the video, the police officer just shot him in the back," Santana said on Wednesday. "I knew right away, I had something on my hands."
Santana's lawyer, Todd Rutherford, told Lauer on TODAY that his client fears for his life knowing that police officers who responded to the shooting continue to be investigated for what happened after Scott was shot, including whether anyone administered CPR to him like they said they did.
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Santana, who is originally from the Dominican Republic, said his life has completely changed since going public.
"Now people know where I live. People know where I work, so my normal routine from just walking to my house to work have changed," he said. "At some point, I thought about staying anonymous and not showing my face and not talking about it. But this [is] something that has to go beyond that (Kim 1-2).
[Paste on Google this NBC presentation of Santana’s video]
Video Shows Fatal Police Shooting - The New York Times
Santana did not immediately release what he’d recorded. Having followed the Eric Garner case, Santana knew [Ramsey] Orta had been incarcerated. He knew justice was rare and witnesses were in danger of police retaliation.
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Santana has said in interviews that he held on to the video because he felt his life would be in danger. He considered deleting it and leaving Charleston altogether. He had reason to believe that the video wouldn’t secure justice for the Scott family, as Orta’s had not for Garner’s family. It took Santana three days to find the bravery to come forward with the video. How many others would not? Have not (Jones 20).
Michael T. Slager played cops and robbers as a boy in the Virginia woods, volunteered as an emergency medical technician after high school and earned an associate degree in criminal justice while working full time as a patrolman.
Before he was caught on video firing eight shots at the back of an unarmed fleeing man and then dispassionately handcuffing him as he lay dying, he received praise from his supervisors at the North Charleston Police Department and excelled in police training. He was also the subject of two formal complaints in five years.
The adults who watched Mr. Slager, now 33, grow up recalled him being a shy loner who struggled to adjust to his broken home, and had a hard time socializing. They remembered him more for what he was not — not much of an athlete, not a troublemaker and not someone who spent much time with friends.
A little more than a week ago he was just a police officer in a working-class city — a homebody whose patrol car was often parked in his driveway — with a wife, expecting their first child together. Now even the police union, which is not paying for his legal defense, has distanced itself from him.
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Mr. Slager was arrested and charged with murder on Tuesday, after state investigators said he had given inconsistent accounts about the shooting of Walter L. Scott, a 50-year-old forklift operator. It is not clear why Mr. Scott ran when Mr. Slager stopped him for a broken taillight on April 4. Mr. Scott told the officer that he was in the process of buying the 1990s-era Mercedes-Benz he was driving but had not yet registered it. Mr. Scott owed $18,104 in child support payments and fees, and an arrest warrant was issued for him in 2013, according to county records.
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The Police Department dismissed Mr. Slager on Wednesday, the day after his arrest ( (Robles, Blinder, and Grant 1-2).
Police records obtained by The New York Times show that Mr. Slager was involved in 19 use-of-force episodes during his tenure as a police officer, including the shooting death of Mr. Scott and the encounter with Mr. Givens.
Of those 19 episodes, the records show, at least 14 involved Mr. Slager’s using his Taser in some manner. Mr. Scott’s shooting was the only time that Mr. Slager fired his handgun while on patrol (Blinder and Williams 1-2).
In 2013, a North Charleston man filed a complaint against Mr. Slager, accusing the officer of arriving at his house in pursuit of a burglary suspect and using a Taser on him on the steps of his own home.
City records show that the man, Mario Givens, told authorities that he had explained to Mr. Slager that the suspect he sought was 5-foot-5. Mr. Givens was 6-foot-3. The burglary victim, who was waiting outside in her car, shouted to the officer that Mr. Givens was not the burglar, according to the records.
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Mrs. Shay, the former neighbor, spoke on Saturday with the officer’s stepmother, who was crying and puzzled over the latest turn of events and wondering whether Mr. Slager had become “desensitized” after joining the Police Department.
“She and I are agreeing on the fact that we both believe that something happened in the training,” Mrs. Shay said. “She agrees with me. I, from the beginning, thought this is not Michael at all” (Robles, Blinder, and Grant 3).
A former police officer in North Charleston, S.C., was indicted Monday by a grand jury on a murder charge in connection with the April shooting death of Walter L. Scott ….
The former officer, Michael T. Slager, had been jailed on a murder charge since April 7, when the video [of the killing] became public. …
Under South Carolina law, there is only a single murder charge, … described as being an “unlawful killing with malice aforethought” — with the premeditation required to exist for only a few seconds before a killing in order to gain a conviction (Blinder and Williams 3).
CHARLESTON, S.C. — In a hushed courtroom, Michael T. Slager, a former North Charleston, S.C., police officer, was indicted here Wednesday on federal charges in the shooting death last year of Walter L. Scott, an unarmed black man.
Wearing a dark suit that only partly covered his cuffed wrists and ankles, Mr. Slager, already facing state murder charges, appeared before Magistrate Judge Bristow Marchant to hear federal charges that accused him of violating Mr. Scott’s civil rights, obstructing justice and using a weapon during the commission of a crime.
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The obstruction of justice charge stems from Mr. Slager’s telling state investigators that Mr. Scott was moving toward him when he fired.
Mr. Slager knowingly misled investigators “by falsely stating that he fired his weapon at Scott while Scott was coming forward at him with a Taser,” the indictment said, when in fact, as the officer “then well knew, he repeatedly fired his weapon at Scott when Scott was running away from him.”
In recent years, amid mounting public outrage over the treatment of African-Americans by the police, the federal government has investigated several deaths — including those of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., Laquan McDonald in Chicago and Eric Garner in New York in 2014, as well as that of Freddie Gray last year in Baltimore.
But the Scott case is the first to elicit federal charges, which Mr. Slager’s lawyer, Andrew Savage, said was unprecedented. “It really feels as if Officer Slager is carrying the burden of many past cases that were handled differently,” Mr. Savage said.
Seth W. Stoughton, a professor at the University of South Carolina, said such an indictment was fairly rare. “There are only about half a dozen cases in which police officers have faced federal civil rights charges for a shooting,” he said. “The reason it’s so rare is the burden of proof — requiring prosecutors to show that it was a willful act, with specific intent. It’s not easy to show what was in someone’s mind.”
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Standing at eye level to a bank of microphones after the court hearing, Walter Scott’s mother, Judy, fought back tears. “I thank God that my son was used to pull the cover off all the violence and the cover-ups that have been going on,” she said. “I’m happy for that. But I’m sad because my son is gone” (Dixon and Lewin 1-3).
On June 8, 2015, a South Carolina grand jury indicted Slager for murder. His trial began on October 31, 2016, in North Charleston. The court proceeding lasted for two months before Judge Clifton B. Newman declared a mistrial after the jury deadlocked. Eleven of the twelve jurors favored a conviction. A few months later, on May 2, 2017, in a plea agreement, the murder charges were dropped when Slager pled guilty to federal charges of civil rights violations. In an out-of-court settlement, the City of North Charleston agreed to pay $6.5 million to the family of Walter Scott (Momodu 1).
On Thursday [December 2017], Michael Slager, who was fired as a North Charleston patrolman days after the shooting, was sentenced to 20 years behind bars after pleading guilty in Scott's death.
U.S. District Judge David Norton, in issuing the sentence, said Slager shot Scott with "malice and recklessness" and then gave false testimony to investigators. Norton ruled that Slager, 36, was guilty of second-degree murder and obstruction of justice, and he also sentenced Slager to two years of supervision after his release.
Scott's mother, Judy, was one of seven family members who spoke before the sentencing. She recalled her 50-year-old son growing up as a "happy, jolly child" and then turned to Slager directly, telling him, "I forgive you."
Slager began to cry.
In his final statement before sentencing, the ex-officer said: "I wish I could go back in time and change the events. But I can't. It's a very tragic situation. I'm standing before the Scott family and the court and taking responsibility for the actions of April 4, 2015."
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While prosecutors acknowledged during the trial last year that Scott wouldn't have been shot if he hadn't resisted in the first place, they said that Slager had been trained against using lethal force in such a situation and had gone too far. A jury of 11 white people and one black man — the foreman, Dorsey Montgomery II — couldn't agree on a verdict.
Montgomery later told "Today" that one other juror refused to convict the officer, while several remained on the fence. He said that while "race will always be a factor," he didn't believe it played into the decision for "the majority" of the jurors (Vann and Ortiz 1-2).
Works cited:
Blinder, Alan and Williams, Timothy. “Ex-South Carolina Officer Is Indicted in Shooting Death of Black Man.” The New York Times, June 8, 2015. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/09/us/former-south-carolina-officer-is-indicted-in-death-of-walter-scott.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer
Dixon, Chris and Lewin, Tamar. “South Carolina Officer Faces Federal Charges in Fatal Shooting.” The New York Times, May 11, 2016. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/12/us/south-carolina-officer-faces-federal-charges-in-fatal-shooting.html
Jones, Chloe Cooper. “Fearing for His Live.” The Verge, March 13, 2019. Net. https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/13/18253848/eric-garner-footage-ramsey-orta-police-brutality-killing-safety
Kim, Eun Kyung. “Feidin Santana, Bystander Who Recorded Walter Scott Shooting: 'I'm still scared'.” Today, April 9, 2015. Net. https://www.today.com/news/feidin-santana-bystander-who-recorded-walter-scott-shooting-im-still-t13671
Momodu, Samuel. “Walter Lamar Scott (1965-2015).” BlackPast, September 17, 2017. Net. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/scott-walter-lamar-1965-2015/
Robles, Frances, Blinder, Alan, and Grant, Jason. “After 8 Shots in North Charleston, Michael Slager Becomes an Officer Scorned.” The New York Times, April 12, 2015. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/13/us/after-8-shots-a-quiet-officer-now-scorned.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer
Schmidt, Michael and Apuzzo, Matt. “South Carolina Officer Is Charged with Murder of Walter Scott.” The New York Times, April 7, 2015. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-officer-is-charged-with-murder-in-black-mans-death.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer
Vann, Matthew and Ortiz, Erik. “Walter Scott Shooting: Michael Slager, Ex-Officer, Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison.” NBC News, Updated December 9, 2017. Net. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/walter-scott-shooting/walter-scott-shooting-michael-slager-ex-officer-sentenced-20-years-n825006
Yee, Gregory. “How Walter Scott’s Death Continues To Reverberate 5 Years Later for Two SC Families.” The Post and Courier, Updated March 26, 2021. Net. https://www.postandcourier.com/news/how-walter-scotts-death-continues-to-reverberate-5-years-later-for-two-sc-families/article_6a6f74dc-58cc-11ea-b9f2-9bb5868db708.html
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