Man who recorded SC police shooting wants anonymity for a reason

If not for a chilling cellphone video, the shooting of Walter Scott in North Charleston might have been written off as a justified police shooting, another case of an officer gunning down a man because he feared for his life.

That was certainly what family members, who doubted the initial police account, had feared until a young man approached the victim’s brother on Sunday afternoon. He was standing in the exact spot where Scott had been killed only hours earlier.

“I have something to share with you,” said the young man, according to Anthony Scott.

He produced a Samsung cellphone and played the chilling video that has now been viewed around the world. It shows Walter Scott running away from Michael Thomas Slager as the now former North Charleston police officer unleashed a volley of gunfire that felled the 50-year-old.

Slager was charged with murder Tuesday, but little is known about the young man who is largely responsible for his arrest. An attorney for the Scott family has said that the young man is afraid he will face retribution and has declined to publicly disclose his name, age or race.

His fears may not be unwarranted. This video is just the latest in a series of unsettling clips that have depicted police officers killing or injuring unarmed black men in recent years. People behind those cameras have lived to regret the attention, and sometimes danger, that came with involving themselves in such high-profile cases.

Before the North Charleston shooting, a cellphone video of Staten Island, N.Y., resident Eric Garner pleading “I can’t breathe” after he was wrestled to the ground, was the one of the most jarring clips tied to recent allegations of police brutality in the U.S.

The man who recorded the fatal clash, 22-year-old Ramsey Orta, told the Los Angeles Times last year he took the video and made it public because he was furious with officers’ treatment of Garner, whom he described as a friendly presence in the neighborhood where he died.

Garner’s death was ruled a homicide by the New York City medical examiner’s office, which determined that the officers’ actions contributed to this death. Many have contended NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo used a chokehold, an outlawed police tactic that has been tied to deaths nationwide, to bring down Garner.

While Orta gave several media interviews in the immediate aftermath of Garner’s death, he retreated from public view after he was arrested in August on weapons charges. New York City police allege he was carrying a stolen semiautomatic handgun, but Orta has contended the arrest was retribution for his decision to make the Garner video public, according to the Staten Island Advance.

A person who answered Orta’s cellphone Wednesday declined to comment.

George Holliday, the Los Angeles man who recorded the beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers in 1991 after being awakened by sirens, has sometimes wondered if he would have been better off staying in bed the night of the incident.

In a 2006 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Holliday said he received death threats when riots followed the officers’ acquittal.

“Be careful when you start your car in the morning,” read one note Holliday received in the early 1990s. Sometimes, when people recognized him as the man behind the King video, Holliday said they called him “the guy who caused the riots.”

Holliday has also said the media attention he got because of the video helped lead to the collapse of his marriage.

Not everyone responsible for recordings of recent controversial police clashes has found themselves crushed by the resulting scrutiny. Anthony Blackburn, the man who filmed the fatal police shooting of a homeless man along Los Angeles’ Skid Row last month, has offered only a few interviews, and seemed to defend the officers’ actions in a March interview with CNN.

“I think that this is an awful tragedy, but the officers took, on the face of it, reasonable steps to avoid it. Had the individual not grabbed the officer’s pistol, certainly we would not be having this discussion,” he said, according to the CNN report.

The person who filmed a similarly unnerving video of police shooting a homeless man in the back in Pasco, Wash., in February has remained unidentified despite national interest in the incident.

The young man who recorded the South Carolina shooting might decide to reveal himself, though it is not clear when, according to the Scott family attorney.

This story was originally published April 8, 2015 at 6:54 PM with the headline "Man who recorded SC police shooting wants anonymity for a reason."