A new video shows Michael Slager, the South Carolina cop now charged with murder after shooting 50-year-old Walter Scott in the back , tasering another man in the back as the victim lies face down with two other officers pinning him down.
The victim of that tasering by Slager, Julius Wilson, is now suing the city of North Charleston as well as Slager and two other officers, alleging they they used excessive force to subdue him when he was not resisting the officers in the first place.
The video, from the dashboard camera of police cruiser, was taken at a traffic stop in North Charleston on August 25 of last year, when Wilson was pulled over by Officer Brad Woods. While Wilson has a criminal record, mostly for drug offenses, he was stopped simply because he had a broken tail light, his suit states.
After Wilson handed Woods his license, the officer then returned to Wilson’s car accompanied by Slager and another officer, Jerome Clemens. Woods said that he needed the other cops backing him up due to Wilson’s supposed “demeanor,” the suit says.
When Woods told Wilson that he was being arrested for driving with a suspended license, Wilson says that he told the officers that his license was, in fact, valid and that he would not get out of the car.
But when Woods saw Wilson reaching for his cell phone, the officer pulled a gun and Wilson stopped refusing to cooperate when he was held at gunpoint. The officers then reach into the car and forcibly drag Wilson out, slamming him face down to the pavement.
As the man is pinned down, Slager is heard on the video telling the other officers, “Back up! I’m gonna tase! I’m gonna tase!”
Slager then fires his taser into the man’s back, and in the video Wilson is heard shouting an expletive as the pain of the electric shock rips through his flesh.
One of the officers, possibly Woods, later says that he might have shot Wilson if he didn’t know that he was being recorded on video.
“He almost got shot. I’m not lying,” the officer is heard to say. “But he advised I was being recorded. I said, ‘Cool, you are, too.’”
Wilson is the second man to accuse Slager of using excessive force with his taser. In 2013, North Charleston resident Mario Givens alleged that Slager pounded on the door of his home in the middle of the night, shouting, “Come outside or I’ll tase you!”
Givens said that he complied and came out of his house , but Slager tased him anyway. Slager was later cleared of wrongdoing by his department in the incident, in an investigation that Givens believes was not serious.
“If they had even tried to listen to me and really investigated, that man would probably have been alive because he wouldn’t have been an officer in the field,” Givens said at a press conference last week.
The video of Michael Slager firing a taser into the back of Julius Wilson is above. In the Walter Scott shooting, Slager initially claimed that he shot Scott after the man grabbed his taser.
[Image: YouTube Screen Capture]