Video shows cops rush to save shooting victim. 3 years later, he’s on trial for murder
On the second day of his first-degree murder trial, Roger Best watched the Roger Best from three years ago — writhing in the middle of South Tryon Street, a bullet hole in his stomach and a circle of Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers working to keep him alive.
In court Monday, as a video appeared on a big screen behind the witness stand, it was the morning of Feb. 15, 2017, all over again.
At 2:30 a.m. that day, Best had used the flashlight on his cell phone to wave down a police cruiser at Tryon and Martin Luther King Boulevard.
In court, Best and his jury watched police body-camera video that revealed the chaos that followed — with Best strewn on the pavement, groaning loudly as police cut away his clothes and applied medical gauze to his gunshot wound above his waist.
“Stay with me, man. What’s your name?” an officer asked.
“Roger,” Best replied.
When police roll him over to check for injuries, Best groaned again.
“Pain is good. Pain is good,” another officer said. “(It means) you’re alive.”
From victim to suspect
Before dawn that morning — with the help of a Duke Energy building surveillance camera and a recycling can on South Tryon — police say they found a few answers. Best’s prosecutors argue that the information helped turn Best from a shooting victim to an accused killer, now on trial for the shooting death of Walter “Wes” Scott.
If convicted of first-degree murder, the 25-year-old Charlotte man faces a mandatory life sentence without parole.
On Monday, his defense attorney, Samuel Randall, continued to probe around the question of why there weren’t more surveillance videos of the shooting and its aftermath. In his opening statement, Randall asked the seven women and five men of the jury not to jump to early conclusions about the events surround Scott’s death.
As Best was being treated by police, the 65-year-old Scott was lying dead a block away on a separate piece of pavement near Romare Bearden Park.
The longtime Charlotte Observer newspaper carrier had been been shot at least seven times at around 2 a.m., moments after delivering the morning papers to the 7-Eleven on West MLK. Prosecutors say Scott, a retired S.C. constable who wore a weapon that night and had several more weapons in his pickup, had gotten off one shot at his would-be robber before Scott died.
Officer Nicholas Krause testified Monday that he had been among the CMPD officers who had raced to the crime scene before fanning out to search for suspects. Witnesses that night had told police that a young black male dressed in black had been seen running down Church Street, moments after the shooting.
Best, according to testimony, had been wearing a black, hooded sweatshirt when he waved down police. That made him a suspect.
Once Best had been loaded in an ambulance, Krause testified that he walked further south on Tryon Street searching for a gun.
Down at the Duke Energy building, Adam Knight was working his last shift as a night-security supervisor before taking a new job. He told the jury Monday that he watched as police cars had thundered up and down South Tryon. He said he stepped outside when he noticed a police officer — Krause — walking nearby.
Knight testified that he told the officer that he had access to 400 surveillance cameras in and around the Duke building, if there was a particular area in which he was interested. When Knight went back inside to rewind the recorded footage, he said, a clip from a camera moored on the Mint Museum caught his attention.
The device, according to Knight, pans the area around the Knight Theater. Flashed on the video screen in the courtroom, the footage showed a figure dressed in black walking near the hedge rows leading to the theater entrance.
After looking at the Duke Energy video clip, Krause began perusing the hedges, he testified. When he came to a gouge in the greenery, he stopped. There, Krause told the jury, he found a black-and-silver handgun.
According to prosecutors, the gun has been linked to the shell casings found not far from Scott’s body.
Glove carried evidence, cops say
The search for evidence continued.
For several hours that morning, CMPD Detective Matthew Hefner testified that he walked the perimeter around the crime scene, making a list of all the surveillance cameras and checking trash cans and recycling bins.
Across South Tryon, not far from where the handgun had been located, Hefner said he peered into a recycling can on the pavement below the Radcliffe’s sign.
There, among the cans and bottles, Hefner testified that he saw a glove. When crime scene investigator Christy Price later removed it, it turned out to be a white, left-handed Rawlings batting glove. It had been turned inside out, as if someone had stripped it off before tossing into the can.
Prosecutors say the glove carried Best’s DNA.
This story was originally published February 3, 2020 at 5:33 PM.
