From USA TodayA bystander's cellphone video, which begins seconds before Slager started shooting, shows Scott fleeing as Slager fires eight shots. Scott was hit three times in the back, once in the buttocks and once on the ear.
Outside the courthouse, local pastors conducted a prayer vigil while awaiting a verdict. One man held a sign reading "Justice for Walter Scott and his family NOW!"
Slager was fired from the force and charged with murder within days of the release of the cellphone video. He has been free since January on a $500,000 bond.
Slager's account of what happened:
From: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/walter-scot ... otal-fear/Slager, who is white, testified in a subdued voice that he had pulled Scott over for a broken taillight, and was preparing to write him a warning ticket when Scott bolted from his car, ran down a road and into a vacant lot.
“In my mind at that time was, people don’t run for a broken taillight. There’s always another reason,” he testified. “I don’t know why he ran. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Slager described yelling stop and “Taser! Taser! Taser!” as he caught up to Scott.
He said he shot his Taser three times, firing both sets of electric darts before using the emptied weapon near Scott’s skin in a so-called “dry stun.”
Slager said Scott fell to the ground after he fired the second time, and he tried to subdue him, pushing him down with an elbow while holding the Taser in one hand and reaching for his radio to call for backup with the other. That was when Scott grabbed the stun gun, he said.
“He rips it out of my hand,” Slager said, demonstrating the position he said he was in.
“I knew I was in trouble,” Slager testified, adding that Scott “was extending his right arm, leaning forward and coming at me.”
“I was scared” and in “total fear that Mr. Scott didn’t stop” resisting arrest, Slager said.
The video begins at roughly this point, showing Scott breaking away from what Slager said was their confrontation over the Taser.
“At that point I pulled my firearm and pulled the trigger,” he said. “I fired until the threat was stopped as I was trained to do.”
Video of what happened:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW5rXN9c67M
Inconsistencies in story:
https://thinkprogress.org/everything-th ... .bqzf2p7yy
Many of us are fine with the "it's up to YOU to not get shot by police officers" mantra, even applying it to the mentally ill and to young children. Many of us are fine with discounting these deaths as exceptions and convincing ourselves that we, as law-abiding citizens, would never fall victim to a cop's bullet. Many more of us believe in the justice system that hasn't convicted a single police officer of extrajudicial murder in the last several decades.
Mostly, I'm surprised that anybody is surprised at what has transpired at this trial.