One of the lessons of Ferguson was that the story is never about the specifics of the shooting—in Missouri, the protests and community unrest were just as much about a long history of perceived and actual acts of injustice and discrimination as they were about the death of Michael Brown and whether his hands were raised in the air in surrender. In New York, thousands poured into the streets because Eric Garner’s dying gasps of “I can’t breathe” gave voice to their anger at the harassment of stop, question, and frisk, and resurrected the pain inflicted years before by shootings like that of Amadou Diallo. The crowds in Cleveland gathered and screamed not only in an attempt to earn justice for Tamir Rice and Tanisha Anderson, but also to awaken their city, so deep in its slumber, so encased in the numbness of Midwestern gloom, that even the most dramatic and horrific violence—the 137-bullet police shooting of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams or the homicidal terror of serial killer Anthony Sowell—passed with barely a public whimper.
Knowing that I’d likely be on the ground for several days, responsible for a front-page piece each day, I started making calls to find out the story behind the story. What was the deal with North Charleston?
First, I always reach out to the family, the attorneys for the family, and the police. This is largely a matter of obligation and typically isn’t particularly fruitful. The police are most likely just going to add you to a media list and send you the updates they give everyone via press release, which are important to receive but don’t do much in terms of advancing the story. An interview with the police chief, or the officer involved in the shooting, would be ideal, but in the days, weeks, and months after a shooting, as a national reporter without local ties, you’ve got better luck camping outside the chief’s house than going through official channels to try to secure one.
The family, likely still grieving and now inundated with media calls, is another long shot. Typically, I don’t even try to contact them directly if I can avoid it. Instead, I approach their attorneys, who then become long-term sources related to the legal updates in the shooting, which will likely trickle out slowly over the course of the upcoming year. Eventually, the family is going to sit down for full-length interviews, and the legal team almost always decides which outlet will get the scoop.
But after putting in a round of calls to all of the above, I try to pivot as quickly as possible to peripheral players: local civil rights leaders, neighborhood associations, the police union, the town’s former mayor or police chief, defense attorneys with long histories in the region, and local elected officials. Almost all of these folks, at some point, will either be formally briefed on the investigation or will acquire vital gossip about the status and details of the investigation. The key is becoming their media friend before some local reporter or pesky producer for CNN gets to them first.
It was close to 9 p.m., but I knew it was now or never. If I waited until I landed in South Carolina the next day, someone else might have sussed out the vivid insider details, or gotten the fruitful tip that, on a story leading every newscast, can set your coverage far above the rest. I kicked my feet up onto my desk and began working the phones.
The first person I was able to get on the phone was James Johnson, a local minister who ran the local chapter of the National Action Network, Al Sharpton’s national civil rights organization. His diagnosis was what I expected it to be.
“North Charleston has a history of shooting and killing black men,” he told me. “So I applaud the mayor and the police chief for coming out and quickly firing this policeman, but the community is a little skeptical. There is a lot that is going to have to happen, and it’s going to have to happen quickly because this community is very angry and we don’t want another Ferguson.”
Johnson, who had spoken with members of Scott’s family, said he was convinced the shooting was a result of racial profiling. Walter Scott had been driving a late-model Mercedes, which he had purchased three days earlier and on which he had installed big spinning silver rims. The traffic stop was allegedly for a missing middle brake light, which in South Carolina is not a moving violation.
State data showed that in a city whose residents were a near fifty-fifty split between black and white, North Charleston police stopped black residents twice as often as white drivers. “Do I get harassed? Do I? Do I?” Virgil Delesline, a twenty-eight-year-old North Charleston resident who works at a Chipotle restaurant, said sarcastically a few days later when I asked him about racial profiling during a protest held outside City Hall.
“It’s ’cause I’ve got a Crown Vic with tinted windows, so they automatically see that as a dope boy car,” Delesline said, adding that he gets pulled over almost weekly—at times having his car searched for drugs—even though he has never been charged with a drug crime.
“There have been lingering concerns for years about racial profiling, things like broken tail lamps or license plates or mirrors not there. People have been intercepted because they happen to be driving nice cars,” local minister Reverend Joseph Darby, Jr., told me. “The bigger context is just as American as apple pie. The Justice Department recently came out with a scathing indictment of what’s happening in Ferguson. But if they looked at any number of police departments across the nation they could come out with the same kind of indictment.”
Next on my call list that night was Wendell Gilliard, the state representative for the district that includes North Charleston. The call went straight to voice mail, so I left a message and kept dialing.
Next came each of the city council members—prioritizing the councilman whose district the shooting occurred in, those who were part of the “public safety” committee, and those with a history of speaking publicly on civil rights issues (in most cases, that means the black council members). But the few I got on the phone didn’t have much to say; it was clear that the city—adamant that it did not want to become “another Ferguson”—was closing ranks and controlling the message.
“This incident just occurred and I’m sure the community is happy that the officer has been fired. Justice is going to be done,” Michael Brown, who had been a member of the North Charleston council for eight years, told me when I got ahold of him on his home phone. He had just arrived home from church and had yet to see the video. “What happened in Ferguson is totally different from what happened here. It took so long for any measures of justice, there wasn’t any video. We had video, and we’ve taken quick action.”
He was right—the speed with which local authorities responded to the bystander video of Walter Scott’s shooting was remarkable. But what remained to be seen was what, if any, the broader fallout would be. What would Walter Scott’s death mean for the state of South Carolina? For the nation?
As I was packing my things to leave, a ring burst from my desk phone.
“This is Representative Gilliard,” the aged Southern voice on the other end of the line declared. “You called?” Once we got talking, the representative barely came up for air. He was outraged by the shooting but was now praying it would provide a crucial opening for movement on two body camera proposals that had for months been stalled in the South Carolina statehouse.
“It reminds me of the Rodney King case,” he declared about Scott’s death. “The person who took this video should be seen as a hero. If they had not videotaped that moment, we would have just had the police officer justifying why he took another black man’s life. We have a real problem in this country, it’s just an all-out war on young black, unarmed men. And we’ve got to get real about this situation.”
Like most who follow police policy, Gilliard could rattle off the agreed-upon antidotes—body cameras, more transparency, retraining officers in de-escalation. Perhaps, he said with just a sprinkle of hope at the end of an otherwise demoralizing conversation, Walter Scott would force the change in policing that for years the nation had been discussing.
“We have too many people who are talking loud and doing nothing,” he told me before hanging up. “Now is
the time, in South Carolina. We need to put up or shut up.”
It was my second or third day in North Charleston, most of which had been spent interviewing demonstrators and local elected officials about the shooting and its aftermath. The speed with which the local elected officials had acted in firing and charging Slager had taken the wind out of some of the protests, one of several factors in South Carolina that kept the demonstrations there from ever swelling to the levels seen in St. Louis and Baltimore. “We’re not going to be another Ferguson,” city officials kept repeating to any reporter who would listen, as they had since those first interviews on the first night of the story.
But—just as the resident in Ferguson had forcefully alleged—the men and women who had taken to the streets in North Charleston, often in dozens as opposed to the crowds of hundreds that I had navigated in Missouri, said they were being overpoliced. Specifically, they noted, through traffic stops.
That day I had gotten a text from Ryan Julison, who had traveled to North Charleston to help the family handle the media storm. He gave me the Scott family’s address and told me to come over. After I had stood for about half an hour outside the family’s home, Walter Scott’s mother emerged from a side door.
The TV types, who had for the last twenty-four hours or so anchored their news vans in the parking lot outside the North Charleston police department as well as here, on the side street where the Scott house sat, were preoccupied. It was just a handful of us print reporters—myself and colleagues from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times—who spotted Mrs. Scott’s reluctant presence. I glanced over at Julison, who responded with a nod, encouraging the pack of us to move forward with our notebooks and recorders to speak to the distraught woman.
There’s no “right” way to approach these interviews. In the moment, you are very literally walking up to a heartbroken human, someone struggling to avoid becoming completely engulfed by a wave of pain and confusion, and asking them to find words to express those feelings and thoughts. And the twenty-four-hour news cycle doesn’t help, because it so often prompts reporters to ask either clichéd, leading sound-bite bait or process questions to which the response of the dead man or woman’s family really adds little:
Do you think you can get justice?
Do you think there should be a special prosecutor appointed?
What do you think about those protesting? You would want them to be peaceful, right?
Now, all of those questions are fine; I’ve asked them all at some point or another. But it’s hard, standing across from a mother whose son has just been stolen from her, or a father whose daughter will be buried next week, to justify asking about legal minutiae. Instead, at the advice of a veteran reporter I once found myself standing beside at the crime tape, my questions to the grieving center on the life lost—a memory, a character trait of the life lived, not a rehashing of the details of how that life was lost.
It always starts awkwardly, typically with me stammering through a preamble that is as much an apology for the fact that I’m in this person’s face asking questions at a time like this as it is a setup for the questions themselves. Can you tell me about Walter? What will you remember about him?
Judy Scott paused. And then sighed. Walter was fifty, but he was still a mama’s boy. He called her every day, his sharp “Hey, Mommy!” flowing into her ear, usually sometime in the afternoon. And at the conclusion of each call, he’d tease her.
“You know you’re my Smurf, right?” Scott would say to his aging mom with the kind of loving tone that can be known only between a mother and her son. “Love you.”
“I don’t know why, but he gave me that nickname: his Smurf,” Judy Scott told us, standing in the driveway of the Charleston home where for the last forty-seven years she had raised her now-slain son. And even now, as a man with children of his own, he spent every Sunday afternoon laid out on her couch, joking around with his siblings and cousins while she worked to prepare their after-church meal. It was a scene that had played out week after week in this home for five decades. Next Sunday, the mother knew, someone, something would be missing from it.
Just two weeks earlier Walter and his siblings had gathered the entire extended family here, for a surprise party for Judy and her husband in honor of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was a joyous evening, full of photo albums, cake, and laughs. And for Judy, it was a night full of tears, because it provided her with everything she had wanted: all of her family, grown but together again.
As Judy Scott spoke, I couldn’t help but imagine my own mother, standing on the lawn in front of our family home in suburban Cleveland, being pestered with questions about me or one of my brothers. I couldn’t help but think about how much Scott’s family sounded like my own: the Sunday-afternoon dinners after church and the all-hands-on-deck gatherings to celebrate an anniversary or holiday.
There is nothing that can prepare a family for the heart-clenching shock of losing one of their own. And time and time again, those left behind described to me how so suddenly a normal, mundane weekday had become the worst day of their lives—a black hole of time permanently etched in the video feed of their minds.
When a police officer in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, shot and killed Corey Jones, his parents were in Jamaica—having taken a trip to clear their minds after the death of another loved one, Corey’s grandmother. But then one of their kids called them. They needed to get back to Florida. Corey was dead.
In Memphis, Henry Williams was sleeping on the night his son took his final breath and spoke his final words, uttered to a paramedic between desperate gasps.
I need some water. I’m about to die.
Williams’s son, Darrius Stewart, had been riding in the backseat of a vehicle that was pulled over for a missing headlight. Officer Connor Schilling decided to ask everyone in the car for photo ID, not just the driver, and found two outstanding warrants for Stewart. He pulled the boy out of the car and set him in the backseat of the squad car. Eventually, the two ended up struggling on the grass after Stewart tried to run. Then Schilling pulled and fired his gun.
For the family of Deven Guilford, a white seventeen-year-old who was shot and killed by an officer after a February 2015 traffic stop, the shooting threatened their security and faith in law enforcement.
The teen was on his way to see his girlfriend, after a pickup game at his church gym, when he flashed his headlights to signal to an oncoming driver that his high beams were on. That driver, it turned out, was Eaton County Sheriff’s Sergeant Jonathan Frost, who pulled a U-turn and signaled for Deven to pull over.
The two had an exchange, during which the officer insisted that his high beams had not been on and Deven refused to produce his driver’s license, which he didn’t have with him. Eventually, Frost ordered the teen out of the car and used a stun gun on him. Frost said Deven got up and attacked him. Attorneys for Deven’s family said he tried to run away. Photos taken soon after the incident show Frost apparently bleeding from the forehead.
In June, prosecutors announced that Frost would not be charged with a crime, and they released the video of the encounter. Deven Guilford’s parents initially accepted the decision not to charge the officer, citing their Christian faith and long-held trust in law enforcement. But that had changed by the time I first spoke with their attorney, sometime in October or November.
I called Hugh Davis late one night, on a Tuesday or Wednesday when I was trying to play catch-up. Our database project had shown that more than one out of ten fatal police shootings began with a traffic stop. And while shootings like Scott’s had gained national attention, many of the others were relatively unknown stories. I figured I ought to try to tell some of them.
It was probably close to 8 p.m. when I punched in the number of Davis’s law office, a libertarian-leaning civil rights shop in Michigan, expecting to leave a voice mail that he’d return sometime later in the week—so I was surprised when a jolly voice burst from the other end of the line.
The same was true of Judy Scott, who had just a day earlier been among the first to watch the bystander video of her son’s death that by now had been seen by millions. Judy Scott had taught her children to respect the police because she did. And she trusted them. The idea that one of these officers had killed one of her children, her son, by shooting him in the back, was too much for her to fathom.
“We’re talking about cameras on the policemen. It’s a shame that you have to do that, because the policemen are supposed to protect us, we’re supposed to be able to trust them,” the mother told us through tears.
“When I saw my son run…I just didn’t want to believe it. I was broken, I was upset. I mean it, that really hurt.”
Judy Scott could only bear to speak with us for a few minutes—which was many more minutes than we deserved. But she did invite a handful of us into the family home, where some other loved ones might be able to give us more details about Walter.
As I entered, the family members paused their conversations, wondering for a moment who this intruder was, before deciding it didn’t matter. Nothing I could take from them, be it time or information, could compare to what had so freshly been stripped from their security and comfort. Seated in the kitchen, I found Anthony Scott, the slain man’s brother.
“Come on over and have a seat!” he implored me, prompting my practiced shtick.
Anthony told me that he and his brother had bonded, like many brothers do, over sports. Specifically, he told me as his sisters and nieces scurried throughout the room arranging dishes and platters brought by friends and neighbors, his brother Walter loved football.
The brothers would play pickup ball late into the night on the gravel street out in front of the house, a cream and green two-story in which they had both been raised, as evidenced by the time capsule of photographs lining the walls and mantel—elementary school pictures, middle school sports team photos, the smiling sons reaching adulthood, Anthony in a cap and gown and Walter in his marine blues.
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