Legally Armed CITIZEN Killed By Hoplophobia

Erik Scott was a West Point graduate who went on to serve honorably
in the Army, get his MBA from Duke and establish a lucrative career in
real estate and as a sales rep for a medical device company. He was 38
years old when he was gunned down in portico of a Las Vegas area Costco
store by officers from the Las Vegas Metro Police Department. While it
was 7 bullets from the only people we’re supposed to trust with guns
that snuffed out Erik Scott’s life, what really killed him was an
irrational fear of firearms – hoplophobia.

Scott and his girlfriend had been shopping in the Costco, but had
been asked to leave when an employee spotted Scott’s lawfully carried
handgun. Scott had inadvertently exposed the gun when he squatted down
to inspect some merchandise. He informed the employee that he was
legally carrying the gun and was in possession of a valid Nevada
concealed weapons permit, but was informed that Costco has a policy
against carrying firearms in their stores.

A brief argument ensued, some raised voices and obvious frustration
on Scott’s part, but witnesses said it didn’t seem like a big deal. They
saw nothing particularly threatening about the incident or the
clean-cut, good looking young man. The store manager who had spoken with
Scott seemed satisfied by Scott’s reassurance that he was a legal
firearm carrier and would be finished with his shopping in a few
minutes. But a store Loss Prevention Officer called the police and
reported that an armed man was behaving erratically in the store.

That report, based on irrational fear, and perhaps some personal
envy, triggered events which quickly spiraled out of control. It seems
that the fear factor was taken up a notch with each description of the
story to the point that responding officers believed they were going
into a violent hostage situation with a heavily armed and dangerous
Green Beret.

Las Vegas MPD responded with a city-wide alert, street closures,
helicopter support and deployment of a Mobile Command Center. The first
officers on the scene arrived as Costco employees were following
telephone instructions from the police to calmly evacuate the store.

As Scott and his girlfriend fell in with other patrons flowing out of
the exit door, the Loss Prevention Officer who started the whole mess
pointed toward Scott and a police officer at the door suddenly began
yelling “Stop! I said Stop! Drop the gun! Get on the ground! Get on the
ground!”

He fired these conflicting commands in quick succession giving Scott
no opportunity to comply with any of them and then fired two rounds at
Scott’s chest. As the officer began yelling and Scott realized he was
the subject of the commands, he turned, lifting his hands, and
apparently tried to follow the legal requirement to immediately inform
an officer that he was an armed weapons permit holder, but he didn’t
have time.

The officer’s frantic orders lasted for a slow count of 3 and were
immediately followed by the two gunshots, a momentary pause, and a
volley of several more shots. There was no pause or hesitation between
the commands and the shots. The first round struck Erik Scott in the
heart, the second hit his right thigh. As he collapsed to the ground,
two other officers fired 5 more shots into his back. Numerous witnesses
reported that they saw Scott turn and declare that he was a permit
holder. Many said they could see both of his hands and that he made no
threatening move. All agreed that the only gun they saw was the one in
Scott’s waistband on his right hip.

Other witnesses reported that they saw Scott’s body removed by EMTs
and saw nothing on the ground except blood and a cell phone, or sun
glasses. EMTs reported that they removed Scott’s gun and holster from
the waistband of his jeans in the ambulance and that they saw no other
gun, yet, after police broke into Scott’s apartment and confiscated the
firearms there, the story came out that Scott was carrying two guns that
day.

A picture of the second gun, on the ground near a cell phone, after
the blood on the pavement had been cleaned up, is the “proof” that Scott
had two guns and pulled one on MPD officers. The store’s video
surveillance system inexplicably malfunctioned for the several seconds
of the shooting.

A coroner’s inquest concluded that the shooting was justified, just
as a similar inquest had concluded that the gunning down of an unarmed,
small-time pot dealer in his apartment a short time before the Scott
shooting was ruled to be justified. Just as such coroner’s inquests have
concluded that officer involved shootings were justified in 199 out of
200 incidents since 1976.

Erik Scott’s family has strongly contested the conclusions of the
coroner’s inquest and the entire inquest process. They succeeded in
getting some changes made to that process, but those changes have been
held up by suits from the police union.

The Scott’s filed a wrongful death suit in federal court, but
recently dropped that effort, convinced that they had no hope of winning
with the system stacked against them.

Erik Scott’s father, a former Air Force flight test engineer and
writer for the prestigious aerospace magazine Aviation Week & Space
Technology, has painted a sympathetic, fictionalized portrait of Erik
and the events of that day as part of a new novel he is offering in
serialized form at ThePermit.blogspot.com
in hopes of maintaining awareness of Erik’s tragic death and bringing
attention to corruption within the justice system and government of Las
Vegas.

The police have a difficult job. They are put in positions and asked
to do things that most of us would run away from, but authority and
power must be tempered with responsibility and accountability. For
decades lawmakers and courts have built up walls of protection around
police and other government workers. It is critical that these public
servants be protected from frivolous suits and baseless harassment, but
they must be held accountable for their actions and investigations into
their activities must be beyond reproach. That is not the case
currently.

When one person’s irrational fear of a peacefully armed man can
result in that man being gunned down by police with no consequences for
anyone except the victim and his friends and family, something is
terribly, terribly wrong. Hoplophobia killed Erik Scott and a corrupt
system allowed his accusers and executioners get away with it.