Just before dawn on a cold April Saturday, Officers Thomas Shea and Walter Scott were patrolling the neighborhood of South Jamaica, Queens, where a rash of parked cars had recently been broken into and stripped for parts. But after a graveyard shift cruising the 103rd Precinct on plainclothes “anti-crime” patrol, Shea and Scott had little to show for their efforts, beyond their discovery of yet another burgled vehicle. Their frustration ticked up when they fielded reports of a taxi carjacking in the area, carried out, according to the radio dispatcher, by “two male Negroes” “twenty-three, twenty-four years of age,” with “possibly a gun.” That car, too, was found abandoned. Jolted out of the humdrum torpor of neighborhood patrol duty, the two white cops were en route back to the station when, near the intersection of 112th Road and New York Boulevard, Scott caught sight of two pedestrians and pulled the car alongside them.
“I got out of the car, identified myself as a cop, and flashed my shield,” Shea later explained, first to other cops on the scene, and then, in more or less the same language, in court. According to him, one of the pedestrians retorted, “Fuck you, you’re not taking me,” and fled with his companion into a nearby vacant lot. Shea chased them until, in his account, the man who had cursed him drew a revolver, at which point Shea was obliged to fire “in self-defense.” As the wounded man fell, he somehow managed to hand the gun to the second pedestrian. Or perhaps he “tossed” it to him. Or maybe he dropped it, and the other pedestrian “bent over to take it”—Shea and Scott described what happened variously and contradictorily. Scott, for his part, confirmed that Shea fired in self-defense, as the first pedestrian spun toward him, gun in hand. Scott also insisted that the second pedestrian used the gun to take a shot at him, causing Scott to return fire himself. Despite Scott’s efforts to pursue the second man, both by car and on foot, his quarry somehow managed to escape, abandoning his fallen companion and ditching the gun along the way.
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