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CHARLOTTE, North Carolina -- Videos released Saturday by the Charlotte police department of the fatal encounter between Keith Lamont Scott and officers do little to answer some of the most significant questions about the shooting.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Kerr Putney has said as much since the Tuesday shooting that sparked protests and brought nationwide media attention once again to the use of deadly force by law enforcement.
Authorities have said an African-American officer shot Scott, who was black, when he made a threatening move with a gun. Saturday, police released photos of a pistol and ankle holster recovered at the scene.
Scott's family has said he had no gun, that he was reading a book and was being non-aggressive when police were surrounding him.
Neither police dashcam nor body-camera footage shows Scott pointing a gun at police officers. At one point in the body-camera video, there is a view of Scott from his right side and he has his arm by his body, but it is unclear if there is a gun.
"You can't clearly identify what, if anything, is in his hand," attorney Justin Bamberg, who represents the Scott family, said at news conference Saturday evening.
Putney had said, before the videos were released, that "there is no definitive visual evidence that he had a gun in his hand."
The chief has also said the videos are part of the evidence, the totality of which will show the shooting was justified.
Bamberg says the videos don't show anything that should have led to Scott losing his life.
What videos show
The release comes one day after a video recorded by Keith Scott's widow was released publicly. Her video shows the moments leading up to the killing of her husband. She tells police that her husband has a traumatic brain injury as they scream for him to put down a gun.
The dashboard camera footage provided by authorities Saturday shows a patrol vehicle approaching the scene where one plainclothes officer, with his weapon drawn on Scott, is visible. Moments later a uniformed officer joins the first officer's position behind a truck.
Someone shouts "drop the gun" several times before Scott exits his SUV. While walking backwards, Scott is shot at four times by Officer Brentley Vinson, who is off camera throughout both videos.
Another camera, worn by a uniformed Charlotte police officer, shows that man running up to the encounter.
The officer moves beside a white truck and pauses next to a plainclothes officer before running around to his left to go around to the other side of the vehicles.
As the officer passes a gap between vehicles, Scott is visible with his right arm by his side. The next time Scott is seen, he is lying on the ground with five officers converging on him. One officer begins medical treatment.
There is no audio for the first 25 seconds of the body-cam video and none of the shots is heard. The silence is common with camera systems that are set up to record the most recent pertinent information because it saves battery life and storage space for recorded files.
Protests continue
Tuesday's shooting of Scott has led to protests -- two of which turned violent at times -- in Charlotte over the past five nights. It is among a number of shootings in recent years that have spurred debate about how and when police should use deadly force and how race factors into whom police shoot.
Demonstrators on Saturday afternoon gathered for a fifth day in the city's center. A diverse crowd of 200 to 300 people marched from Marshall Park after a short rally.
Even more people showed up for another protest later in the day.
Fritzi Ross of Carrboro said that when all the videos were considered, "there was no reason to shoot him."
Another demonstrator, Steffen Merkel, said, "It's crazy. Like he just got out of the car and got shot."
The shooting
Central to the protests are the differing accounts between police and Scott's family over what led to his death. Authorities said officers were at the complex looking for another man named in a warrant when Scott pulled up next to the vehicle two of them were in.
One of those officers was Vinson, who said he saw Scott rolling a marijuana joint and then showing a gun, according to a police statement Saturday.
Police said the officers, who were in street clothes, went to another location and put on vests that identified them as police.
When they came back they ordered Scott to drop his gun. A uniformed officer who had arrived tried to break a window with his baton. Scott then got out of the car, a police statement said. Officers continued to yell at him to drop a gun before Vinson fired.
"Officer Vinson perceived Mr. Scott's actions and movements as an imminent physical threat to himself and the other officers," police said.
Scott's DNA and fingerprints were on the gun, police said.
Scott's family has said he was reading a book and waiting for his son to come home from school at the time. Police said no book was found at the scene.
When asked if the family has changed its feeling about whether Scott had a gun, Bamberg said no, but the attorneys were just beginning to gather facts.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation has taken over the criminal investigation. The internal affairs division of the Charlotte police department is determining if any policies were violated.
'Don't shoot him'
Scott's widow released her cell phone recording of the shooting -- the first to be released publicly -- on Friday.
"Don't shoot him. He has no weapon," Rakeyia Scott can be heard saying in the footage. The first portions of the shaky video appear to show a number of police officers surround a vehicle in a parking lot.
A man repeatedly yells for someone -- apparently Keith Scott -- to "drop the gun."
"He doesn't have a gun. He has a TBI (traumatic brain injury)," Rakeyia Scott says. "He's not going to do anything to you guys. He just took his medicine."
She goes on to say: "Keith, don't let them break the windows; come on out the car. Keith! Don't do it. Keith, get out the car. Keith! Keith, don't you do it. Don't you do it. Keith! Keith! Keith!"
The video shakes, and for a moment, a man in bright blue pants is seen near the surrounded vehicle. Gunshots are heard as Rakeyia Scott says again, "Don't you do it."
She then yells: "Did you shoot him? Did you shoot him? He better not be (expletive) dead." Two people kneel over the figure with blue pants, apparently Keith Scott, now lying on the ground.
Police said an officer shot Scott after he failed to heed commands to drop a gun. His family has said he didn't have a gun.
The gun police say they recovered from the scene was loaded, a source close to the investigation told CNN. The source said investigators recovered from the weapon fingerprints, blood and DNA that matched with Scott. The source said the blood most likely got on the gun after the shooting.
'We want the public to take a look at this tape'
An attorney for the Scott family told CNN the tape was released because officials would not furnish the police footage to the public.
"We want the public to take a look at this tape and see what was in the video before he was shot, and what was there afterward, and ask how it got there," family attorney Eduardo Curry said Friday.
Rakeyia Scott spoke of TBI in the tape, a reference to traumatic brain injury, Curry said. Scott's family has said he was disabled after being in a near-death motorcycle crash last year.
"My understanding (is) that he had had an accident last year that was pretty traumatic, and as a result, made him at least disabled in some particular instances (and was) taking medication for it," Curry said.
The Scott family said it released the video in the "name of truth and transparency," according to a statement released by attorney Charles G. Monnett. "We encourage everyone to reserve judgment until all the facts are known. This is simply one step in our quest to find the truth for this family."
Police allowed the family to see the police-held footage Thursday, but the public has yet to see it.
On Friday, Charlotte-Mecklenberg police Chief Kerr Putney said he expected police videos of the shooting to be released eventually when investigators decide it can be done as part of a package with other information, so the videos aren't made public without context.
That stance differed from the chief's message a day earlier that the public shouldn't expect the videos' release.
Curry said he doesn't expect Rakeyia Scott to speak publicly soon.
"Give the family a chance to mourn and grieve," Curry said. "At some point we'll revisit (whether she'll speak)."
The shooting
Hundreds of people have protested Scott's shooting each of the past four nights in Charlotte.
Though Thursday and Friday were relatively peaceful, violence rocked the first two nights, with businesses vandalized and one protester shot dead in front of a hotel. Police arrested Rayquan Borum on Friday in connection with the fatal shooting of Justin Carr.
No arrests, injuries or property damage were reported from protests Friday night into Saturday morning, police said.
Central to the protests are the differing accounts between police and Scott's family over what led to his death. Authorities said a black police officer fatally shot Scott, a father of seven, at the apartment complex as officers looked for another man named in a warrant they were trying to serve there.
Police said Scott had a gun as he exited his vehicle, and that Officer Brentley Vinson shot him after Scott did not comply with officers' commands to drop the weapon.
Scott's family has said he was reading a book and waiting for his son to come home from school at the time. Police said no book was found at the scene.
What the police videos are said to show
Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts has said that one factor affecting the timing in the release of the police videos is that investigators want to record witness' accounts and don't want their recollections altered by what they see on the videos. Vinson was not carrying a body camera, police said.
Scott's family said the police videos showed him acting calmly and not aggressively. Scott didn't own a gun or habitually carry a gun, family attorney Justin Bamberg said.
"When he was shot and killed, Mr. Scott's hands were by his side, and he was slowly walking backward," he said.
The police chief has said the video does not provide "definitive visual evidence" that Scott pointed a gun at officers. The investigation has been turned over to the State Bureau of Investigation, which said the Charlotte-Mecklenberg police are still the custodians of the videos and can release them if they want.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory said Friday that the bureau has been looking for several days into the deadly encounter between Scott and police. State investigators have interviewed most of the critical witnesses in the shooting, McCrory said.
Meanwhile, a photo obtained by CNN affiliate WSOC-TV shows the immediate aftermath of the shooting, a source close to the investigation told CNN.
A black object near the bottom of the photo is a gun that police found at the scene, the source said.
North Carolina recently passed a law that blocks the release of police recordings from body or dashboard cameras with limited exceptions. That law is set to take effect in October.
The mayor said an attorney for the city told her the law will not affect decisions about whether to release the videos in Scott's killing, because it was not in effect at the time of the shooting.
