Cop arrives at murder and finds friend: ‘Wes! That’s the paper guy. Who shot him?’
Veteran Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Officer David Nance already had begun crying on the witness stand when footage from his body-worn camera appeared on the main screen of the courtroom.
For the first 30 seconds, the video from Feb. 15, 2017 had no sound as Nance’s patrol car barreled silently through uptown in response to a “shots fired” call at 2:20 a.m. near Romare Bearden Park. A mile later, he stopped in front of the 7-Eleven on West Martin Luther King Boulevard.
Suddenly, Nance’s video shows him playing simultaneous roles — a 20-plus-year Charlotte beat cop securing a crime scene vs. a grieving friend who had just gotten his first good look at the victim.
By now the audio of the video has kicked in for listeners in the courtroom. Nance’s voice roars out.
“That’s Wes, man!,” he says.
He shouts to another officer already on the scene: “That’s the paper guy. Who shot him? Who shot him? Where’d they go, man? We got one down.”
A few feet away, the body of longtime Charlotte Observer paper carrier Walter “Wes” Scott lies sprawled near his black Toyota pickup. Moments before, he had stopped to drop off papers at the convenience store. Now copies of the Observer tumbleweed along the pavement, in and out of view.
The chaos of the scene, bathed in the eerie predawn light of uptown, provided a dramatic backdrop and soundtrack to the opening day of testimony in the first-degree murder trial of Roger Best.
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Prosecutors Terra Varnes and Bill Bunting told the 12-member jury that Best, 24, and a convicted felon, had emptied his handgun at Scott during a botched robbery turned gunfight outside the 7-Eleven.
Scott was also armed and got off one shot, Varnes said. Best fired 12, with as many as eight striking the 65-year-old Scott, she said.
As Scott lay dying in the street, Best, according to the prosecutor, fled on foot through uptown, tossing the murder weapon into some bushes near the Knight Theater on South Tryon Street.
Samuel Randall, the defendant’s attorney, expressed his condolences to Scott’s family, who filled multiple rows on the prosecution’s side of the courtroom. But he asked the jurors to wonder why prosecutors would be presenting relatively little video evidence of the crime when there were surveillance and traffic cameras throughout uptown on the night of the shooting.
According to Randall, the paper carrier, a retired S.C. constable, had four weapons in his possession on the night he died, and that Best and a companion were just “two young black men walking through uptown.”
Speaking in soft tones that had some jurors straining to hear him, Randall asked the seven women and five men to wait until all the evidence has been introduced before deciding what had happened three years ago.
In her opening statement, Varnes said the evidence of Best’s guilt already is overwhelming. The recovered casings from the murder scene matched a gun that police say Best used in the attempted robbery. A bullet removed from Best’s abdomen had been fired from Scott’s own weapon, she said.
Scott delivered the paper throughout uptown for 40 years and was widely known by the homeless and third-shift workers along his route. Nance said the two met shortly after he became a cop, and that they saw each other regularly on the job as Scott hauled his Observers and Nance patrolled his beat.
“I considered him a friend,” Nance told the jury.
On the night Nance found his friend’s body, his body-cam video shows the officer repeatedly calling out Scott’s first name as if trying to wake him.
‘He told me his name’
Benjamin Slauter said he was one of the CMPD officers who roamed uptown that night in search of a suspect.
A block away from where Scott died, Slauter testified that he drove up on a young black man in the middle of South Tryon. He was using a light from his cell phone to frantically wave the officer down, Slauter testified.
He wore a black coat, T-shirt and tan boots, Slauter recalled, and he was bleeding heavily from a bullet wound in his stomach.
When the officer turned the man on his side to treat the wound, Slauter testified, the bullet bulged beneath the skin of the man’s back. When Slauter asked him where and how he had been shot, the man said he didn’t know.
There was one thing the officer said he learned.
“He told me his name was Roger,” Slauter testified. “Roger Best.”
This story was originally published January 31, 2020 at 5:13 PM.
