Witness: Man shot by South Carolina officer given no warning
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. – An eyewitness whose cellphone video put a South Carolina police officer in jail on a murder charge said Wednesday that he did not hear the white officer give any warning before he fired eight times at the back of a black man who can be seen in the footage running away before he falls to the ground.
Feidin Santana told NBC News that while walking to work Saturday morning, he saw Officer Michael Thomas Slager controlling Walter Lamer Scott on the ground, and began recording when he heard the sound of a Taser. “Mr. Scott was trying just to get away from the Taser,” said Santana, a barber originally from the Dominican Republic. “He was just looking for a way to get away from the police.”
Slager initially claimed he fired in self-defense after the suspect he had pulled over for a broken brake light grabbed his Taser.
Santana’s recording documented a different scenario. It begins at a moment when both men are standing, as Scott pulls away from the officer and an object appearing to be a stun gun falls to the ground, trailing wires. As the unarmed man runs away, Slager then pulls out his Glock pistol and fires eight times at the back of the 50-year-old man, until he crumples to the ground about 30 feet away.
Santana also said he didn’t see the officer render any first aid to Scott after he was on the ground. Santana said he was so shaken by what he had witnessed that he initially considered erasing the video from his phone and leaving town.
“I felt that my life, with this information, might be in danger,” Santana said.
Santana said he changed his mind after reading the version of events as recounted by the police, which didn’t match what he had seen. He said he provided the video to the dead man’s family because he didn’t believe anything would happen to Slager if he didn’t come forward.
After the video was made public by a lawyer representing the family on Tuesday, Slager, 33, was swiftly fired and charged with murder, potentially resulting in a sentence of 30 years to life in prison. A judge ordered the ex-officer jailed without bond, pending trial.
But that did little to quell the outrage of an angry crowd at North Charleston’s City Hall, where the mayor and police chief were shouted down with calls of “no justice, no peace.”
Not once in the moments recorded by Santana can the officer be heard yelling “stop” or telling the man to surrender. Moments after handcuffing the dying man face-down on the ground, Slager walks back to pick up what appears to be the Taser, then returns and drops it at Scott’s feet as another officer arrives to check the dying man’s condition. Then he picks it up again after exchanging words with the other officer.
The video changed everything, authorities and advocates said Wednesday.
“What if there was no video? What if there was no witness, or ‘hero’ as I call him, to come forward?” the Scott family’s lawyer, L. Chris Stewart, told the Associated Press. “We didn’t know he existed. He came out of the blue.”
Mayor Keith Summey announced that he’s ordering 150 more body cameras so every uniformed officer on the street will wear one, a key demand of the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing nationwide. For his part, police Chief Eddie Driggers said “I have watched the video. And I was sickened by what I saw. And I have not watched it since.”