The Victim
Walter Lamar Scott, 50. Former Coast Guardsman. Father of four. A father figure to others besides, according to those who loved him.
And now dead after four bullets to the back and one to the ear, all dealt as he tried to run away when a routine traffic stop erupted into a deadly police confrontation early Saturday.
Local high school football star Fadol Brown, now a defensive lineman at Ole Miss, declared Scott “my step dad” on Twitter late Tuesday, as the shocking bystander’s video shed vastly different light on the weekend tragedy.
“I loved him to death,” wrote Brown. “That cop didn’t have to shoot him down like a dog … gone miss you man.”
Ole Miss officials later clarified the relationship between Scott and Brown, saying the Scott was in a relationship with the mother of Fadol’s longtime girlfriend.
Scott’s own criminal history includes a string of arrests related to contempt of court charges for failing to pay child support and he was wanted on a similar Family Court warrant at the time of Saturday’s traffic stop. A lawyer representing the family suggested on Tuesday that Scott’s fear of possible jail time over child-support debts may have driven his decision to run.
Though the emergence of cellphone video from an unidentified bystander could ultimately lead to a murder conviction, Scott’s parents expressed the anguish of enduring the images of their son’s death in separate television interviews Wednesday.
“I almost couldn’t look at it to see my son running defencelessly, being shot,” Judy Scott told Good Morning
America. “It just tore my heart to pieces.”
But Walter Scott Sr. questioned whether any charges would have arisen if not for the damning footage.
“It would never have come to light. They would have swept it under the rug, like they did with many others,” he told NBC’s Today.
“The way he was shooting that gun, it looked like he was trying to kill a deer,” said Scott Sr. “I don’t know whether it was racial, or it was something wrong with his head.”