CHARLESTON, SC — When I sat down to meet Walter Scott’s brother, Anthony, at a Ruby Tuesday in Charleston last week, he was sitting alone in a booth near the back of the restaurant, wearing a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. It’s football season, and Anthony is realizing that he’ll never get to root for the Cowboys with his younger brother again.
“It’s tough right now. It’s the beginning of football season and me and my brother loved the Cowboys. That’s our team,” he told ThinkProgress. He spoke slowly but confidently, clearly accustomed to the spotlight that has followed his family in the six months since the shooting.
“We used to call each other during the game, after the game, throughout the game, and talk about what was going on,” he said. “I’m going to miss that. I’m going to tremendously miss that.”
On April 4 of this year, 50-year-old Walter Scott was pulled over in North Charleston for driving with a non-functioning third brake light. The details of the morning aren’t entirely clear, but Scott attempted to flee the scene — Anthony claims he was behind on child support and did not want to be jailed again. The police officer, Michael Slager, tried to stop him by firing his Taser. When that was unsuccessful, Slager fired eight rounds of bullets at him from behind. The coroner has said that the father of four was hit five times, with one bullet entering his heart.
Slager originally claimed that Scott had taken his Taser and that he feared for his life, but a video — handed over to police shortly after the incident — revealed that Slager had been lying and that he may have planted a weapon next to Scott as he lay injured in the field.
The former officer was charged with first-degree murder and was denied bond earlier this month.
Like many family members of victims, Anthony said he never expected his younger brother’s life to be taken by a police officer. Anthony, Walter and their younger brother Rodney grew up in Charleston, attending church three times a week, playing football and going to the local football games. The three boys rarely had time to get into trouble with police.
“My dad wouldn’t have had that,” he said. “North Charleston has always had a type of reputation, so you had to be careful when you did go there. But we never really went that way too much anyway. Not growing up.”
Though they lived a few miles to the south in the city of Charleston, they were aware of the North Charleston Police Department’s propensity to target African American men and women.
“It’s always been: be precautious when you’re in North Charleston because even if it’s a little thing, it could be blown into a big thing,” he said. “So you don’t want to get stopped for anything or arrested for anything.”
Later in his life, Walter moved to North Charleston — the city he’d been wary of as a child. And as expected, he was targeted by police on at least one occasion before the shooting.
“He was walking home from work,” Anthony said about the one encounter that he can remember. “He was in a neighborhood he rented a house in, was walking home, and they said that he looked like a suspicious character… They [stopped] him for being a suspicious character in his own neighborhood.”
At that point, they ran his record and discovered that he was behind on his child support payments. He ended up spending around five months on work release during which he would report to his job during the days and go back to jail at night.
Anthony cites that arrest as one reason Walter may have run away from Slager — he was the subject of a bench warrant for more than $18,000 in unpaid child support, and he wanted to get away or alert his family that he’d been arrested. South Carolina has one of the harshest laws when it comes to punishing parents who are behind on child support.
“I know this much — he probably didn’t want to go back to jail because he knew he was behind on his child support,” Anthony said. “I don’t know how he was that far behind on his child support, but it would definitely be a ticket to go back to jail.”
Walter’s intentions are still unclear to Anthony. But one thing he did know for sure — in the days following the shooting, before the anonymous bystander turned over his cellphone video, he knew Slager’s account could not have been accurate.
When someone approached the family with video and Anthony watched his brother die, “it was just absolutely unbelievable,” he said. “But not unbelievable in a way that I didn’t believe what happened, but unbelievable in a way that he lied about his story. I just couldn’t believe that. And then stuck to it. He stuck to his story. That’s just awful. And he’s still sticking to it.”
Because of the video, Walter Scott’s case did not go the same way as so many similar cases — like Michael Brown’s in Ferguson and Eric Garner’s in New York. “We really thank the Lord for that,” Anthony said.
Slager was indicted by a grand jury and will soon face trial. A study by a South Carolina newspaper found that police in the state have fired their weapons at 209 suspects in the last five years, but none has been convicted.
Nevertheless, Anthony remains hopeful that Walter’s case will be different. “I would have never thought my brother would be one of the victims,” he said. “But when he became one of the victims, I was sure to let them know that it would not go the way the other stories have gone. We’ll make sure that he gets justice. Not only will he get justice, but we don’t want to see it happen to another family anywhere in the United States.”
If nothing else, his family can’t face any more bad news after this difficult year. In June, Anthony said he was speaking about his brother to a group in Jacksonville, Florida when he learned that a young white man shot and killed nine African American churchgoers at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston.
It’s been really tough for Charleston.
“It was just so tragic because I was speaking about the violence that happened to my brother and then something else hit Charleston, even more tragic,” he said. “It’s been really tough for Charleston.”
The massacre was especially hard for the Scott family because Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of the nine people killed, was also a state senator who worked tirelessly to move body camera legislation through the state legislature. Just a month before he was killed, Pinckney delivered remarks about Walter on the Senate floor and led a community prayer service to discuss the problem of gun violence in light of Walter’s murder.
“It’s just awesome. It’s just awesome,” Anthony said about Pinckney’s speech to the Senate. “And then to know that he was a victim three months later,” he trailed off.
The bill was passed and signed into law on June 10, a week before the mass shooting. “When we signed a bill for the body cams, he was there and he was actually standing right behind my niece,” he continued. “It’s almost an eerie picture. I was just looking at the picture and he’s standing directly behind my niece.”
As the trial moves forward, Anthony said he and his family want to see Slager locked up for life — “we’re not one for the death penalty or anything like that” — because it would bring a sense of justice and relief.
But a verdict against Slager wouldn’t be enough for Walter, Anthony said. Walter would have wanted his case to “make a change in America” and to be the incident that triggers systematic reform, whether that’s through better police training or improving race relations.
“He looked at life and things a lot different than I did,” Anthony said. “He always saw the good and bad in all things, but more good than bad. It didn’t matter what the situation was, he always had something positive to pull out of a bad situation…He’s going to find some good out of anything.”