Bx. man killed, genitals cut off
This isn’t about all police officers in this country being on trial the way Officer Michael Slager is. This is about Slager being on trial, for a terrible and ultimately tragic few minutes on April, 4, 2015, in North Charleston, when Scott eventually got the death penalty for a broken taillight.
It wasn’t just that, of course, once Slager pulled Scott over. There was a scuffle between the two men and Scott ended up taking Slager’s Taser and pointing it at him, the former cop testified. We know all that by now the way the jury of 11 whites and one black man — who chose up these sides? — knows that.
We know that Slager’s version of things is that he felt Scott was stronger than he was and posed an imminent, deadly threat to him.
“I just knew I was going to lose the fight,” Slager said when he took the stand in his own defense.
Before long he had his .45-caliber Glock in his hand, and was shooting Walter Scott dead as Scott ran from him in an area known as Charleston Farms.
In that moment, on that day, this became so many other moments in America over the past few years when it came down to a white cop and a black man who didn’t have to die by cop gun, from Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., to Philando Castile in Minnesota to Walter Scott. Only people in outer space haven’t seen the video of what happened to Walter Scott, as he ran for his life.
“I pulled my firearm and pulled the trigger,” Slager said on the witness stand. “I fired until the threat was stopped like I’m trained to do.”
Now there is apparently one slow-thinking juror who is actually buying that cockeyed version of things. Slager said he was trained to do what he did that day. What threat was he trying to stop as Scott ran away from him? What was he afraid of, that Scott might be out of range if he didn’t open fire when he did?
Now this one holdout juror sends a note to the judge that says, “I cannot in good conscience consider a guilty verdict” against Slager and that “I cannot and will not change my mind.”
If that is true, then this is a conscience that has been soaking in dishwater. Slager also spoke in his testimony that the death of Scott has been a tragedy in Scott’s family and in his own. He is right about that. But Scott is gone and he is here, and if what we have all seen on that video isn’t murder, or at the very least manslaughter, then North Charleston and the country will be ripped apart by race once again, and blacks in America will be more convinced than ever that there is a different justice system for them, one that is, far too often, no justice at all.
Slager may honestly believe that Scott was going to win any fight between them, with or without a Taser. But Slager was the one with the Glock. Now we are going to find out whether the law will hold in North Charleston, S.C., or if one juror, blind to the video evidence and blind to real justice, really is going to let Slager to get away with murder.
There is a different kind of gun death in a New Orleans suburb right now, the death of an ex-New York Jet named Joe McKnight, dead after an alleged road rage incident. We have all seen the sheriff down there explain why the alleged shooter was allowed to sleep in his own bed after McKnight was dead in the street because something happened with two cars on a bridge and one of those involved, white, happened to be the one with the gun.
But in South Carolina, the white man with the gun was a policeman, the cop with the gun ended up shooting Walter Scott dead because of a traffic stop involving a taillight. It was the way it started for Philando Castile in July, when he was fatally shot by Jeronimo Yanez, a St. Anthony, Minn., police officer — one who has now been charged with manslaughter — after Castile was pulled over in Falcon Heights, a suburb of St. Paul. So Falcon Heights became another place where we went from a broken taillight to a needless and senseless tragedy. Castile was the one whose automobile got him a death sentence.
Yanez has yet to go on trial. The trial of Michael Slager is in a jury room now, where one juror says he can’t or won’t convict Slager of murder. It would be a different kind of tragedy in South Carolina, a different kind of hate crime. And Walter Scott’s life would be the latest black life that doesn’t matter in America. “We are not doing well well. We’re tired,” Anthony Scott, the brother of the slain man, said Saturday. “We are continuing to pray, that’s what we are doing right now.” He and his parents endured a tense court session on Friday. Despite strong evidence — including video of the fatal encounter — the South Carolina jury of 11 whites and one AfricanAmerican couldn’t reach a verdict. A lone holdout refused to convict, the jury said. Teetering on the edge of a mistrial, the jury made a final attempt at a consensus and agreed to return Monday for more deliberations. A HOMICIDAL gigolo chopped off a 68-year-old Bronx man’s penis and left him to bleed to death Saturday night, police sources said.
A neighbor found the victim lying on his side in a bathtub on Sheridan Ave. in Claremont about 8:30 p.m., cops said.
A 32-year-old man, believed to be a prostitute who had has sex with the victim in the past, was arrested near the scene.
Cops think he chopped off the victim’s penis during a spat over an unpaid debt.
The suspect told detectives that he cut the man’s genitals off with scissors — though cops also found several knives out in the kitchen.
The unnamed suspect also told cops that he wanted to “eat the penis,” police sources said.
The suspect was being held at the 44th Precinct stationhouse Saturday night awaiting charges.