Black man shot to death in traffic stop; officer charged
Walter L. Scott was shot to death on Saturday, April 4 in North Charleston, South Carolina, after being pulled over with a broken taillight.
Scott, 50, fled from Officer Michael T. Slager, 33, who had pulled him over. The victim’s brother, Anthony Scott, believed that Scott ran under the assumption that he had been pulled over for failing to pay child support for several months.
In police reports filed immediately following the incident, Officer Slager claimed that he had “feared for his life” because Scott had taken his stun gun before fleeing.
It was this fear, Slager claimed, that led him to use deadly force on the fleeing victim, which would fall under the Supreme Court holding that an officer may do so when a suspect “poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”
Moments afterwards, Slager reported: “Shots fired and the subject is down. He took my Taser.”
A video, taken by a bystander, shows a different story, however. The video begins in the vacant lot, where Officer Slager has pulled over Scott. It appears that Slager has fired his Taser, as wires from the stun gun appear to extend from Scott’s body.
Scott then turned to run, and something – presumably the Taser – is dropped to the ground between the two men. Officer Slager draws his gun, and when Scott is about 20 feet away, Slager fires eight shots, with five hitting his target and at least one entering Scott’s heart.
The shooting follows other high-profile cases involving lethal force at the hands of police officers in New York, Cleveland, and Ferguson, among others.
With results different than several of these other cases, the North Charleston mayor announced that Officer Slager has been charged with murder on Tuesday, April 7.
“When you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” said Mayor Keith Summey in the announcement. “If you make a bad decision, [I] don’t care if you’re behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision.”
-Compiled by Alyssa Ottema