The wife of a man fatally shot by police here earlier this week recorded part of the encounter, and video that was released Friday captured her pleading with officers not to fire at her husband.
This video footage was the first glimpse of what happened before and after a shooting that has inflamed Charlotte and prompted intense, sometimes violent protests. The recording emerged as city officials have refused to release police video showing an officer shooting and killing Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old black man.
The recording, taken by Scott’s wife on a cellphone, did not capture the shooting itself, but instead shows an officer aiming a gun at an unseen Scott while police yell at him to drop his gun.
In the video, Rakeyia Scott can be heard yelling to the officers that her husband did not have a gun.
“Don’t shoot him,” she said. “Don’t shoot him. He has no weapon. He has no weapon. Don’t shoot him.”
She then urges Scott to come out of the car, and repeatedly says, “Don’t you do it,” until multiple gunshots are heard. At this point, the camera is facing the ground.
“Did you shoot him? He better not (expletive) be dead,” she yells, hurrying closer to the scene on a tree-lined street.
When she gets nearer to the scene, at least four officers are seen gathered around someone who is down on the street. Two of the officers were kneeling over the person on the ground.
NBC News first published this video on Friday afternoon, and attorneys for Scott’s family released it to The Post and other media outlets.
Police have said they have no immediate plans to release two recordings of the shooting, which inflamed Charlotte and prompted days of intense, sometimes violent protests in the city. One of these videos was captured by a police dashboard camera, and another by a body camera worn by another officer at the scene, according to the Scott family’s attorneys.
Authorities have said officers encountered Scott because they were searching for another man – a suspect with an outstanding warrant. According to police, officers saw Scott get out of a car with a handgun and get back into it, and they ordered him to get out and drop the weapon. Police say he posed a deadly threat and refused to drop the gun.
Video of the officer shooting Scott has become a focal point for demonstrators here, who have taken to the city’s streets and called for footage to be released. Scott’s relatives, including his wife, watched the police videos on Thursday, according to their attorneys, and came away with “more questions than answers.”
Justin Bamberg, an attorney for the family, had said Thursday that Rakeyia Scott witnessed the shooting.
“It’s my understanding that his wife saw him get shot and killed,” Bamberg said. “That’s something that she will never, ever forget.”
This footage released Friday came after a relatively calm night, as two nights of violent protests gave way to largely peaceful demonstrations that stretched into the early morning hours.
Authorities said that a curfew intended to help keep the city calm would continue into the weekend, while also announcing that they had arrested a man for shooting a demonstrator during violent protests earlier in the week.
Police had said late Thursday that a protester injured a night earlier – identified as Justin Carr, 26 – died from his injuries. They initially offered little information on the shooting and what happened, but Friday morning they announced that Rayquan Borum, 21, was arrested and charged in the killing.
Officials on Friday praised the previous night’s protests for being far less chaotic than the prior nights, noting that they imposed the curfew but never chose to employ it, even as Charlotte remains under a state of emergency and patrolled by National Guard troops.
Protesters out for a third night of demonstrations were chanting “What curfew?” and kept marching until nearly 2 a.m. Friday in defiance the curfew, and police chose not to enforce it.
Business leaders and others have been deeply alarmed by the protests in one of the South’s main commercial hubs. But police also fear that sweeping crackdowns could add fuel to the tensions. And chief among the issues feeding the protests is whether Scott was armed when he died and the level of threat he posed to officers.
Charlotte police have said Scott posed “an imminent deadly threat” and refused commands to drop a weapon. Scott’s relatives have said he was reading a book and was unarmed when he encountered the black plainclothes Charlotte officer who fatally shot him. Officials say they found a gun, but not a book, at the shooting scene.
Dozens of people have been arrested in the protests and violent spillover, which has included looting and damage to storefronts and cars. During the demonstrations late Thursday, two Charlotte police officers were treated by paramedics after being sprayed with some kind of “chemical agent by demonstrators,” the department said.
The curfew was signed late Thursday by Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts, although even after it began at midnight, demonstrators protesting a fatal police shooting kept marching on the streets. With the curfew in effect until 6 a.m., demonstrators chanted: “What curfew? What curfew?” Many of the demonstrators had quietly dispersed before 2 a.m.
Kerr Putney, the Charlotte police chief, explained Friday that he had requested the curfew because officials received intelligence that a “violent group” from South Carolina was heading to the region to join the protests. Because of this suggestion and what he described as protesters pulling on gas masks and others blocking streets, he asked Roberts to seek a curfew that he said is “a tool to help us maintain order.”
“Release the tape! Release the tape!” a crowd of protesters chanted as they left a Charlotte park on Thursday evening and wound through the city’s streets as officers with bikes looked on. National Guard Humvees rumbled down streets still littered with broken glass, passing through areas where businesses remained closed and many people stayed home because of the chaos.
Protesters here were peaceful Thursday evening with crowds smaller than previous nights. But, as the night went on, they grew tense for a bit as police in riot gear blocked roads as the crowds grew restive.
Around 9:15 p.m., protesters clambered up the steps of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Government Center. They were met by a line of National Guardsmen standing in front of the building’s glass doors. After protesters shouted harsh words at the guardsmen, they kept moving toward the police department, where they took to the steps and shouted, “Give us the tapes.”
At one point protesters outside the Mecklenburg County Jail chanted, “No justice, no peace.” Inmates flicked the lights and waved as the crowd yelled, “Set our brothers free!”
Around 10:25 p.m. several dozen demonstrators poured onto Interstate 277, some chanting, others sitting in the roadway and others locking arms in a chain.
The demonstration halted traffic, closing the thoroughfare in both directions. Within 10 minutes, teams of officers in riot gear converged on the demonstrators, firing pepper balls – paintball-like projectiles full of a stinging substance. The crowd scattered up the grassy hills on either side of the freeway. While several demonstrators appeared injured, it was unclear if any were arrested.
Charlotte City Council member Al Austin said the curfew gives police the authority to make arrests. Authorities said the curfew will continue until the mayor decides to rescind it or the state of emergency is lifted.
“It gives the authority, that doesn’t mean we have to do it. We’re hoping people disperse,” Austin said.
Bank of America is closing its Uptown Charlotte headquarters for a second day Friday in the wake of the protests.
With little information about the shooting forthcoming, questions persisted in the South’s second-largest city, which has more than 827,000 residents, a third of whom are black. Police said that they had made 44 arrests as of Thursday.
Other officers at the scene were wearing body cameras at the time, though the officer who shot Scott – Brentley Vinson, who was placed on paid administrative leave – was not wearing any recording device.
Putney, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police chief, said that video footage of the encounter did not give “absolute definitive visual evidence that would confirm that a person is pointing a gun,” but he said that the footage and other evidence “supports what we’ve heard” about what happened.
Putney later told CNN that the video was not from an angle that would show a gun in Scott’s hand, but he said witnesses saw a gun and one was found nearby. However, he said the department has no imminent plans to let the public view this footage and make a determination.
“You shouldn’t expect it to be released,” Putney said during a news briefing Thursday. He added: “Transparency is in the eye of the beholder. … If you think I’m saying we should display a victim’s worst day for public consumption, that is not the transparency I’m speaking of.”
Corine Mack, head of the Charlotte chapter of the NAACP, said she didn’t think a bigger law enforcement presence on Thursday would solve anything.
“More police presence is never going to help,” said Mack, who wants the video released. “More cops does not help. More transparency helps. More communication helps.”
Mack said that there had been “nothing but love in the air” before police turned up in riot gear. “A police officer’s job is to de-escalate the problem,” she said.
Scott’s relatives, who asked authorities to show them video of the shooting, watched it on Thursday, attorneys for the family said. In a statement, one of the family’s attorneys, Bamberg, said the videos show Scott calmly leaving his car when asked to do so by police and not raising his hands or acting aggressive.
Bamberg also said the videos do not show if Scott has anything in his hands, which he said were at his side when he was shot, the footage showed. Scott’s family has called on police to release the videos “as a matter of the greater good and transparency,” and called on people to protest peacefully.
Scott, who had been married for two decades and had seven children, had a disability due to injuries sustained in an accident, Bamberg said during a news briefing Thursday.
Footage of the encounter could help settle the dispute over whether Scott was armed, and many activists who have protested how police use force have argued that video evidence is the only way to know for sure what happened during an incident.
Police would release the video only when they find “a compelling reason,” Putney said, adding that he believed footage would do little to calm the anger.
“I can tell you this: There’s your truth, my truth and the truth,” Putney said. “Some people have already made up their minds.”
Scott is one of at least 707 people shot and killed by police so far this year and the fourth person shot and killed by a Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer, according to a Washington Post database tracking such deaths.
His death comes on the heels of a fatal police shooting in Tulsa, and another in Columbus that killed a 13-year-old last week. On Thursday, Officer Betty Shelby, who shot and killed 40-year-old Terence Crutcher in Tulsa last week, was charged with first-degree manslaughter.
Speaking this week, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, said that the deaths of black people at the hands of police is “unbearable, and it needs to become intolerable.” On Thursday, Donald Trump, her Republican opponent, bemoaned the unrest in Charlotte and said he felt drugs were a “very, very big factor” in the violence.
Also Thursday, Clinton called Charlotte Mayor Roberts and Rep. Alma Adams, D-N.C., to discuss the shooting and protests and to offer any assistance during this difficult time, her campaign said in a statement.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus delivered a letter to Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch on Thursday demanding “an end to what appears to be the targeting and profiling of black people that result in their deaths” and calling on the Justice Department to do more to stop police shootings.
“I know that these are difficult times,” Lynch, a North Carolina native, said during a news conference Thursday. “I know that the events of recent days are painfully unclear and they call out for answers. But I also know that the answer will not be found in the violence of recent days.”
Lynch again called for peaceful demonstrations, saying that those engaging in violence are “drowning out the voices of commitment and change and ushering in more tragedy and grief in our communities.”
The FBI and Justice Department are monitoring the situation involving Scott’s death, Lynch said, but federal officials have not launched their own investigation.
The NFL said Thursday that it was “monitoring events in Charlotte” but was still planning to have the Carolina Panthers host the Minnesota Vikings for a game Sunday.
Antonia Arnold, who has lived in Charlotte for three years, said “a lot of people are scared” of the violence.
“Charlotte’s not really like this,” said Arnold, 20, a student at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte. There’s obviously a divide … but there’s never any conflict, really. And now all of a sudden, even with the peaceful protests, it just escalated.”
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Cleve R. Wootson Jr., Mark Berman, Lindsey Bever, Katie Zezima
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