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baldeagle wrote:Having reread some of my posts, I want to be very clear about my thinking. Erik Scott would be alive today if he had simply followed the officer's orders. He made a terrible mistake by attempting to surrender his weapon to the officer, and he paid with his life. I believe Erik was offended that he was being challenged by the officers (based on testimony) and irked that his 2A rights were being questioned. Similar sentiments have been expressed here by members of this forum. The one takeaway I devoutly pray that we all get from this horrible incident is that when LEOs challenge you, obey immediately, without arguing and without questioning and never touch your weapon under any circumstances. Even if you have to swallow giant chunks of pride and belief, shut up and obey immediately. There will be plenty of time later to sort out who was right and who was wrong and to file complaints if you feel your rights were violated. If you do not obey immediately and without resistance, you may never get the chance to complain about your rights.

I believe this was a bad shoot. I believe Officer Mosher is a bad cop who should be dismissed from the force and never allowed to serve in law enforcement anywhere again. I believe the two rookies who fired made a terrible mistake initiated by adrenaline and possibly fear but precipitated by Mosher's abysmal lack of judgment. He was the senior officer. He is responsible for the outcome. He should be and needs to be held accountable. I'm unsure whether criminal charges should be brought against him, but I'm leaning toward the opinion that they should be. I think manslaughter is an appropriate charge. I hope and pray the inquest jury rules the shooting, at a minimum, as excusable but wish they would rule it criminal. Given the outcome of all previous inquests, I don't hold out much hope of that. I fear the verdict will be justified. That would be a travesty.

As further information comes out, the list of likely scenarios gets refined as is normally the case. From the testimony so far, it appears that Erik attempted to follow the first part of the guideline above when he was told to "Drop it". Since the gun wasn't in his hand, the only way to comply was to retrieve it from his waistband. He hadn't considered the second part, which in that instance was contradictory. I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of our Forum members hadn't given thought to this circumstance prior to the Las Vegas tragedy either.

As I pointed out in one of my earliest posts on this thread, the tactical management of the situation by the responding officers was absolutely atrocious, needlessly exposed everyone involved to extreme danger, and the fact that it produced a tragic result is not surprising. The only part I do find surprising is that with so many people so nearby no one else was hurt by the police gunfire.

As is true with vehicle wrecks, aircraft crashes, and industrial catastrophes (think BP oil rig blowout), a competent investigation always reveals that the event occurred as it did not due to a single factor or error, but at the end of a cascading stream of issues like bad training, equipment failures, misinformation or misinterpretation of good information, bad judgment, etc. I expect that when the final truth comes out (and I think it will because Erik's father will push it as long as he is alive) we will find incompetence and poor judgment on the part of Costco employees, incompetence, poor judgment, poor training or poor retention of training, and the eagerness to take a life I have discussed in other threads on the police side, and a lack of knowledge of how to manage a confrontation with badly performing police as well as possible impairment of judgment from pain medication on Erik's side were all contributing factors.

There may be others as well. Only time, evidence, and testimony will tell.

BrianSW99 wrote:

Beiruty wrote:Then, the evidence is clear, the officer overreacted and shot Erik when he was disarming himself. Any one asked the officer how one is supposed to disarm himself?

When the police are pointing guns at you, you don't. The last thing you want to do is make a movement toward your own gun. The officers will take care of the disarming, most likely after you're on the ground.

I agree you shouldn't disarm yourself when being held at gunpoint, but someone who hasn't thought this through beforehand might very well do so in an attempt to comply with the command "Drop it!" as was reportedly used by at least one of the officers on scene.

philip964 wrote:Erik's father came clean about the drugs Erik was taking before the Inquest.

http://erikbscottmemorialblog.blogspot.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Erik had a back injury from the Army.

Did you know he was texting in the store. Seems they left that out since it would not fit with the "dazed" story they are presenting.

The wording of this article indicates that Erik's father has a high degree of confidence that unaltered video will surface at some point.

There's little else to suggest this is the case, and I don't think he's the kind of man to bluff. I think he's got an ace up his sleeve.

Stay tuned for what happens after the inquest.

PeteCamp wrote:

It no longer matters who was right or wrong. No lawsuit or policy change will bring that man back to life. He is gone.

I simply cannot believe you posted this. If someone shot your child (or whoever) and they died as a result, would you simply say it no longer matters who was right or wrong? I think not. When someone is killed should we just throw up our hands and say it doesn't matter who was right or wrong because, after all, they are dead?

I wear a badge and I can say unequivocally that shooting a suspect, who is down on his face with two, or possibly three, gunshot wounds, four more times in the back is tantamount to murder. At the very least, the Grand jury would return a recommendation to prosecute those responsible for manslaughter. That alone guarantees that a finding by a jury of right or wrong is critically important. Unless you enjoy the prospect of the police just shooting people down for no reason.

I'm not going to Monday morning quaterback what Erik did or did not do in the Costco until I see the facts - and the truth. I'm not going to assume he did anything wrong until I see the truth. However, in light of the allegations that those four shots were fired, the LVMPD, if it had evidence otherwise, would have released it long ago. That it has not done so is cause for concern for every resident of Clark County - and every American who believes in right and wrong and the concept of justice.

I emphatically agree.

If pursuing the truth and seeing that justice is done isn't important enough to do here, I can't imagine when it might be. I don't think anyone wants to go down that path.

92f-fan wrote:One article I read said that Costco ins required the video to be stored in 2 places - One off site ...
If thats true
Why havent they just used that copy ?

Hard drive recovery is very expensive but very reliable - They should be able to recover the video, IF thats the goal

They could easily have copied the relevant video onto a CD or portable hard drive with the on site equipment at the Costco store if they wanted to. This would have eliminated the issue with trying to find the relevant data without the system's database that indexes stored video to time and camera stamps as it appears they're now trying to do.

baldeagle wrote:

Excaliber wrote:If five shots were fired into the back of a prone disabled individual, even if he had previously been a threat (which is not at all clear at this point), I think it will be difficult to come up with an explanation to justify them from the circumstances as that have been reported so far.

Excaliber, won't they be able to tell who fired each shot by examining the ballistics of the bullets? Or is that just on TV? If it's true they shot him five times after he fell to the ground, then I can't say what I'm thinking about the police in Las Vegas.

I want to believe that it's not true. I've always been a strong supporter of law enforcement. However, I recall the statement of one eye witness, which I posted earlier in this thread, that blood was coming out of his chest as he slumped to the ground. That accords well with this description; one in the shoulder, one in the chest and five to the back. If true, it's possible Erik could have survived the initial volley and died from the shots to the back. In my opinion, that should be manslaughter for whoever fired.

All of this, of course, is predicated on speculation and uncorroborated witness statements quoted in the media, which I don't trust at all to tell the truth, so we are going to have to wait for the now-delayed inquest in the hope that the truth will come out.

In a pistol shooting case like this, there's a good chance that a match can be made between some or all of the recovered projectiles and the guns that fired them. Metro PD knows where the guns are, so that solves one problem. The condition of the recovered rounds and the way they were handled during evidence recovery and analysis will be the determining factors in whether or not there is enough intact jacket material that was marked by its passage through the bore of a particular weapon to enable a positive match between the recovered projectiles and similar reference rounds fired through the guns in question in the lab.

If you're interested in seeing how this is done, check out this video.

philip964 wrote:In this article http://www.lvrj.com/news/witness-list-d ... 48369.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

The lawyer mentions near the end of the article that he has 15 witness some of whom are doctors or lawyers as close as five feet away who say Erik was not a threat and that he did not have time to react to any of the orders before he was shot. He also said that Erik was shot seven times including five times in the back while he was on the ground

This obviously is from Erik's attorney and he is not under oath, but this is terrible if it is true.

I found that the army forums have picked it up this story as this is one of their own, and they are not happy campers either.

I would say the delays and the forensic examination of the video (which apparently there are lots of cameras nearby) do not bode well for Costco and the police officers involved.

The location of entry and exit wounds, the angle of passage through the body, and the ground impact points of full penetrating shots (if any fully penetrated and if in fact he was shot in the back while on the ground), and the projectiles themselves are all items of easily read physical evidence. If the attorney's allegations are true, the proof should not be difficult as long as evidence was properly collected and preserved.

If five shots were fired into the back of a prone disabled individual, even if he had previously been a threat (which is not at all clear at this point), I think it will be difficult to come up with an explanation to justify them from the circumstances as that have been reported so far.

mgood wrote:

seamusTX wrote:Police somewhere like Montana or Idaho would get more benefit of doubt.

Randy Weaver lived in Idaho. . . . Oh wait, the feds murdered him.

Mr. Weaver is still alive. His wife and teenage son were shot and killed by federal officers.

PeteCamp wrote:Excaliber....Or anyone here qualified to comment. Can you explain beyond what the media is reporting about the problems associated with the Coroner's Inquest process in Nevada that has the ACLU complaining? I have never served on a Texas Grand Jury, but the process sounds very similar.

Also, I would like to know more about the the process in the Texas legal system for an officer-involved shooting. Do the Texas Rangers automatically get involved? Or is it by invitation? Does the FBI automatically investigate? And do the Feds do their own independent investigation, or do they just look over what the local PD has found?

I have been involved in a couple of shootings where our department has asked the Rangers to conduct their own independent investigation to prevent the kind of community mistrust from happening like that which is obviously going on in Las Vegas. Seems most people trust the Rangers implicitly.

Sorry for all the questions.

I have no direct knowledge of the Nevada coroner's inquest system and am therefore not qualified to comment.

In Texas, the Rangers are not automatically brought into shootings by officers of municipal departments without exceptional circumstances. They are sometimes asked to conduct impartial investigations to reduce the chances that a department's own investigation may be perceived as biased by the public, as in the situations you cited.

The FBI has jurisdiction only in violations of federal law. Their involvement in municipal police shootings usually comes about in cases where there are credible allegations that an incident included violations of someone's civil rights.

baldeagle wrote:

Excaliber wrote:

PeteCamp wrote:I think this is correct, but it could be in error. It is reported that the video surveillance system was one of the new top of the line systems by the same company that installs them in casinos. It uses a hard drive to record and they pulled the hard drive out and then could not read it because it was no longer attached to the main CPU and software. They sent it to an outfit in CA to see if they could find the video amongst all the directories on the hard drive.

This is the situation I described as a likely issue in an earlier post.

If they had simply left the drive in the system, they would have been able to retrieve the video - assuming, of course, that was their objective.

I would be shocked if the videos aren't in a standard format; mpeg, h261 or h263 or vc-1. I do hard drive forensics fairly routinely at UTD, and the forensics software makes it extremely simple to create a copy of any file and run it on a standard viewer. Obtaining the videos, even from a damaged hard drive, is certainly possible and in many cases easy to do. In addition, I'd be surprised if the supplier wouldn't provide the investigators with a copy of the software that accesses the videos. Modern software is smart enough to pass over bad hard drive sectors, so it's unlikely that any video would be corrupted. It's hard to imagine a circumstance, unless their system was very old, that would make the videos non-recoverable.

In short, if the videos turn out not to be available, I would be extremely suspicious.

Since the video surveillance system at Costco was reportedly state of the art, I'm sure you're correct that the videos are in a standard format and are more than likely intact and therefore recoverable with or without the surveillance software Costco uses.

The challenge will lie in finding the few minutes of recordings you're looking for from a small handful of cameras on a 2 terabyte drive that has stored simultaneous 24 hour recordings from dozens of cameras for a rolling 30 day time period. The volume of data on that drive will be huge. Without the database that indexes date, time, and camera with a recording's location on the multiple disks in the drive, it will require either a lot of painstaking review or some clever software to locate and copy the evidence in this case.

This may be part of the reason for the delayed inquest. Then again, it may not.

PeteCamp wrote:I think this is correct, but it could be in error. It is reported that the video surveillance system was one of the new top of the line systems by the same company that installs them in casinos. It uses a hard drive to record and they pulled the hard drive out and then could not read it because it was no longer attached to the main CPU and software. They sent it to an outfit in CA to see if they could find the video amongst all the directories on the hard drive.

This is the situation I described as a likely issue in an earlier post.

If they had simply left the drive in the system, they would have been able to retrieve the video - assuming, of course, that was their objective.

5thGenTexan wrote:I've purposely stayed off this thread and read it with a slightly different view than most similar ones in the past. I find it amusing that some of the responses people have let totally unverified "eye/ear witness" accounts color their view of wheather to carry or not, who did right or wrong.

This will most likely prove to be somewhere in the middle of the extremes like most. Everything I've seen so far indicates a series of poor decisions and tragic failure to think things through resulted in a good mans death in his prime.

Unfortunately there is no way to know how any one person will act or react in any given situation. Why do we including myself always seem to jump onto one side or another before the facts all come out? Why does a tragic situation always have to be the cops fault, the "victims" fault, or the "BG" fault. In this case the cop is self evident, the victim is Eric, the BG is Costco Staff.

I have a feeling when all of this shakes out, this will be a mixture of overreaction by the store staff, possible poor cover decision and reaction or movement by Eric, unclear and confusing orders from officers that may be on the aggressive end of the spectrum and/or poorly trained.

Could this have been prevented? Sure a lot of ways, not all would be considered options by most on this forum. Could this have been prevented in this case? Most assuradly with any of a host of very minor nuances changed. Will it stop most CHL's from carrying? Not likely.

I will wait to make any judgement as to where the fault lies for this tragic situation till all the results are in.

Catastrophic incidents (other than natural disasters) don't happen because of a single action or failure. They occur as the culmination of a complex series of smaller events that have individually gone wrong before and haven't been recognized and corrected, or have been recognized but neglected, so they are primed to happen again.

The difference in a catastrophe is that a series of these things all happen together in the same place at the same time to produce the major event. This is true of train wrecks, vehicle accidents, whitewater rafting and sky diving deaths, and plane crashes. It also happens in the management of potentially violent incidents with deadly force.

I would expect that a thorough and impartial investigation will find the same thing here with contributing errors by all the major parties involved. I think we'll also see that most of them, if they had happened alone and other of the parties had acted differently, would not have resulted in the tragedy that happened. It's only the combination of all of them in sequence that produced the sad event we've seen here. There will be plenty of blame to go around, and lots of "if only's" that could have changed the outcome but didn't.

baldeagle wrote:On March 24, 2010, Costco announced (pdf) that they had selected Virtual Surveillance as their video surveillance vendor. The press release reads, in part,

“Security personnel are faced with an overwhelming volume of video and data, making it difficult to pinpoint events of genuine importance” said John Mitchell, VP of sales at Virtual Surveillance. “Our digital surveillance systems offer behavior recognition and forensic analysis to help save time and zero in on relevant and critical data.

Virtual Surveillance handles several Vegas casinos, and their surveillance systems are state of the art. The contract called for beginning the installations in Texas. Hopefully the system was in place at the Summerlin store and the video will be made available at the inquest. That's the only way we will know what really happened, both inside and outside the store.

One of the challenges the forensic investigation will face is that, in sophisticated modern surveillance systems, the information needed to locate specific video recordings is stored in a database that is maintained by the system's software on the server that is the heart of the system. The video images themselves are stored in a hard drive on the digital video recording unit, which was reportedly seized as evidence. The database is the "map" that allows the user to retrieve the images he wants.

When the recorder's hard drive is examined without the software and database, there is no "map" of where the images from a particular camera in a particular time frame are located on the drive. Finding the recording you want is not easy. It would be somewhat like trying to find a single document file on your computer if you couldn't see the folder and file structure that organizes your data and the file names weren't in English. This may well be the "technical difficulty" referred to in the news.

TXlaw1 wrote:

baldeagle wrote:One thing this has done is cause me to decide that my decision to carry is for my personal safety and the safety of my family, not a civic duty or an opportunity for me to help others. I am much less likely to get involved in someone else's problem to the point of using my gun unless I am absolutely certain that I have no other choice. I'll be a good witness, but if you're looking for a bodyguard, you should have carried yourself. It may be crass to say it, but if I have to decide between your life and mine, that decision was made a long, long time ago. I will not risk my life for you unless the odds are highly in my favor.

This is a dramatically different approach to carrying than the one I adopted early on when I first made the decision to get my CHL. And it's a direct result of Erik's death.

This transition in attitude is what I am dealing with as a recently retired LEO who carried off-duty to protect myself and the public. Having the badge next to the gun in case someone noticed I was carrying made a difference and represented the authority I had under law.

Now as a CHL, I'm dropping the protection of the public part - except in rare situations where peoples lives are in immediate danger, like the Luby's massacre - and simply focusing on myself and my loved ones who are with me. It is taking a little getting used to but is easier each day.

That transition takes time and a lot of getting used to. It also seems to be something each retiring LEO encounters on his own and is a bit taken aback by as the full impact of the realizations and implications of the change in status slowly dawn on him. I haven't seen any agency training programs that address it, but I think there's a need for that.

It took me over 2 years to complete the process to the point where I was no longer reacting to situations like an LEO and having to mentally jerk back on my reins to keep myself from jumping into situations to do things that were no longer necessary nor appropriate.

A few hours of training for officers approaching retirement would go a long way toward making this transition smoother than it is.

jimlongley wrote:

WildBill wrote:

Excaliber wrote:"Contagious shooting" (some officers firing only because others did) is a mark of an agency with a drastically deficient training program. Even when shooting is justified, not every officer at a scene may be in a position to see the justification. A well trained and conscientious officer must and will hold his fire until he is both individually justified in using DPF and he believes it is necessary to do so.

I am glad that you posted this. I was going to bring this up in an earlier post, but was not aware of the term "contagious shooting." I can easily visualize this happening in a tense situation when several officers are pointing their guns at a suspect." After the first shot is fired, I can imagine the volley of shots that would follow without further consideration.

Wouldn't Amadou Diallo be a good example of that?

Yes, that tragic NYPD case is a good example of misidentification of a common object (a wallet) as a deadly weapon, contagious shooting, and poor shot discipline as well. Many agencies have learned much from it and adapted their training accordingly, but there are still some who don't seem to have gotten the memo.