Charlotte Cops Kill Man Who Was Allegedly Unarmed and Reading in Car Setting Off Protests

Police fatally shot an African-American man named Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Tuesday evening. According to the Charlotte Observer, officer Brentley Vinson, who is also African American, fired the shot that killed the 43-year-old father in the parking lot of the Village at College Downs apartment complex. Protests erupted at the site of the shooting, during which which “several dozen police officers in riot gear” fired tear gas into the crowd. Witnesses of the shooting and the officers involved give vastly different accounts of what actually transpired. In a statement released Tuesday night, CMPD officials say officers were looking for a suspect with an outstanding warrant when they “observed a subject inside a vehicle” who “exited the vehicle armed with a firearm,” before getting back into the car. The account goes on to state that as police approached the vehicle, the man, now identified as Scott, “got back out of the vehicle armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers who subsequently fired their weapon striking the subject.”
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/charlotte-cops-kill-man-who-was-allegedly-unarmed-and-reading-car-setting-protests