Officials are now reviewing their decision to exonerate him in the earlier case.
North Charleston Police spokesman Spencer Pryor said the department will take another look at its decision to absolve officer Michael Thomas Slager of any wrongdoing in a case involving his use of a Taser against Mario Givens, who recounted his encounter with the officer in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press.
Slager has now been fired and is charged in the shooting death of Walter Lamer Scott following a traffic stop over a broken taillight.
The latest case of a white police officer killing an unarmed black man caused an uproar after a video recorded by a bystander showed Slager firing eight times as Scott ran away. There has been a plunge in trust between law enforcement and minorities after high-profile police killings of black men in Missouri and New York City.
Givens told AP on Wednesday that he was awakened before dawn one morning in September of 2013 by loud banging on the front door of his family’s home.
On his front porch was Slager. Givens said he cracked open his door and asked the officer what he wanted.
“He said he wanted to come in, but didn’t say why,” said Givens, now 33.
Then, without warning, Slager pushed in the door, he said.
““Come outside or I’ll tase you,”” he recalled the officer saying. “I didn’t want that to happen to me, so I raised my arms over my head, and when I did, he tased me in my stomach anyway.”
He said the pain from the stun gun was so intense that he dropped to the floor and began calling for his mother, who was also in the home. At that point, he said another police officer came into the house and they dragged him outside and threw him to the ground. He was handcuffed and put in the back of a squad car.
Though initially accused of resisting the officers, Givens was later released without charge.
It turned out that the officers had gone to the family’s home at the behest of his brother’s ex-girlfriend, who earlier reported awakening in her house to find Matthew Givens in her bedroom, uninvited. She said he left when she began screaming, and she called police.
That woman, Maleah Kiara Brown, told the AP in an interview on Wednesday that she and a friend had followed the officers over to the Givens home and were sitting outside as Slager knocked on the door.
She had provided the officers with a detailed description of Matthew Givens, who is about 5 feet 5 inches (1.5 meters, 12.7 centimeters) tall. Mario Givens stands well over 6 feet (1.8 meters).
“He looked nothing like the description I gave the officers,” Brown said, referring to Mario Givens.
She said she saw the police officers drag Givens out of the house and throw him in the dirt. Brown said she kept yelling to the officers they had the wrong man, but they wouldn’t listen. Though Givens was offering no resistance, she said she saw Slager use the stun gun on him again.
She said she later told a female police supervisor what she had seen.
Mario Givens filed a complaint the next day.
'Just alike'
Givens and all of the witnesses contacted by the AP said no one from the
department ever contacted them to see if what they saw differed at all from what Slager put in his incident report.
That report, obtained by the AP through a public records request, provides a very different version of events. Slager wrote that he could not see one of Givens’ hands and feared he might be holding a weapon. He wrote that he observed sweat on Givens’ shirt, which he perceived as evidence he may have just run from Brown’s home, and then ordered him to exit several times.
When Givens didn’t comply, Slager said he entered the home to prevent him from fleeing, and was then forced to use his stun gun when Givens struggled against him. In the officers’ report, the Givens brothers are described as looking “just alike.”
A brief report included in Slager’s personnel file said a senior officer was assigned to investigate. After a couple weeks, the case was closed with a notation that Slager was “exonerated.”
Of Scott’s death, Givens said, “It could have been prevented.”
“If they had just listened to me and investigated what happened that night, this man might be alive today,” he said.
(AP)
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