Warning: The video is graphic in nature and may disturbing to viewers.
Video footage taken by an anonymous bystander shows the confrontation between 50-year-old Walter Scott and 33-year-old police officer Michael Slager. Slager shot the unarmed black man in the back five times, as he fled from the officer. Slager claimed he feared for his life because Scott had struggled with him over his taser. However, the video footage paints a very different picture and seems to show officer Slager planting a taser on Scott’s body after his death.
In the video, a bystander hears the confrontation and runs to the fence and begins filming. What he captures is horrifying. A black man in a green shirt can be seen running away from the officer. The cop is then seen firing eight shots, five of which make contact with fleeing Scott. The man falls to the ground and the officer places handcuffs on the fatal injured man.
As the Daily Mail points out, the officer did not begin firing until Scott was 15 to 20 feet away . Therefore, many question how exactly the officer felt threatened at the time of pulling the trigger. In addition to the shocking shots fired at the fleeing man’s back, the officer then appears to plant a weapon next to the dying man’s body.
“Slager then handcuffed Scott’s lifeless body and moved an object – possibly the Taser – from where it fell to the ground some 30ft away and placed it next to the victim.”
In addition, the video providing clear contradictions to officer Slager’s account of the incident. It also shows evidence that CPR was not administered to the dying victim in a timely fashion. Instead, the officer handcuffs the man and a second officer joins him at the scene. Both stand over the man, neither providing CPR, as the North Charleston sheriff’s office claimed. Finally, the second officer drops to the ground and begins checking the man’s body for what appears to be weapons as he looks in his waistband and under his shirt. He does not pull anything from the man’s body.
At no point during the nearly three-and-a-half minute video does anyone provide CPR to the unarmed man who was shot five times in the back by the police officer. As a result of the startling video, officer Michael Slager is being charged with murder for the death of Walter Scott.