Homicide. David Simon

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      H8152

      Homicide/Police Shooting

      John Randolph Scott B/M/22

      3022 Garrison Boulevard, Apt. 3

      CC# 87-7L-13281

      “What a piece of shit this turned out to be,” Worden says softly, leafing through the office reports at the front of the file. Pushing back in his chair, he props one leg on the desk and opens a second binder to a series of color photographs, stapled two to a page on a set of manila dividers.

      John Randolph Scott lies on his back in the center of the alley. His face is smooth and unworn; he looks younger than his twenty-two years. Locked, empty eyes stare south toward the red brick side of a rowhouse. His clothes are those of any kid on any corner: black leather jacket, blue jeans, beige shirt, white tennis shoes. Another photo shows the victim rolled on his side, the rubber-gloved hand of a detective pointing to the small hole in the back of the leather jacket. An entrance wound, with the corresponding exit found in the left center chest. Above the young man’s eye is a bloody contusion caused by his fall to the concrete.

      The medical examiner later determined that the bullet that killed John Randolph Scott fully penetrated his heart at a slightly downward angle, consistent with the downward slope of the alley in which he was found. Scott died almost instantly, the pathologists agreed, shot in the back while fleeing from officers of the Baltimore Police Department.

      In its earliest hours, the Scott case was regarded not as a murder but as a police-involved shooting—a bad police shooting that would require some careful writing if a cop wasn’t going to be torn apart by a grand jury, but nothing that anyone was going to start calling a crime.

      The victim was one of two young men in a Dodge Colt that a two-man Central District car made for stolen and chased from Martin Luther King Boulevard down I-170 and then onto Raynor Avenue, where Scott and a twenty-one-year-old companion bailed out and ran in separate directions through the alleys of the rowhouse ghetto. As the two Central uniforms jumped from the radio car to begin a foot chase, one of the officers, twenty-seven-year-old Brian Pedrick, stumbled and fired one shot from his service revolver. Pedrick later told investigators that the shot was an accident, a wayward round fired when he lost his footing while staggering from his car. Pedrick believed that his gun was pointed down and that the bullet struck the asphalt in front of him; in any event, the round seemed to have no effect on the suspect he was chasing, who disappeared into the labyrinth of back alleys. Pedrick lost sight of the kid, but by then other cars from the Central, Western and Southern districts were rolling through the nearby side streets and alleys.

      Minutes later, a Central District sergeant called for an ambulance and a homicide unit as he stood over a body in an alley off Monroe Street, about three blocks from where Pedrick had fired his one round. Was this a police-involved shooting? the dispatcher asked. No, said the sergeant. But then Pedrick himself walked up to the scene and admitted letting one go. The sergeant keyed his mike again. Correction, he said, this is police-involved.

      Worden and his partner, Rick James, arrived at the scene minutes later, looked over the dead man, talked with the Central District sergeant and then inspected Pedrick’s service revolver. One round spent. The patrolman was relieved of the weapon and taken to the homicide unit, where he acknowledged that he had fired one shot but declined to make any other statement until he had talked with a police union lawyer. Worden knew what that meant.

      A union lawyer has a standard response to a detective’s request to interview a police officer as part of a criminal investigation. If ordered to do so, the officer will submit a report explaining his actions during a shooting incident; otherwise, he will make no statement. Because when such a report is written in response to a direct order, it cannot constitute a voluntary statement and therefore cannot be used in court against the officer. In this case, the state’s attorney on duty that night refused to order the report and, as a consequence of the legal impasse, the investigation fixed itself on an obvious course: proving that Officer Brian Pedrick—a five-year veteran with no prior record of brutality or excessive force—had shot a fleeing man in the back with his service revolver.

      For twelve hours, the Monroe Street investigation was certainty and cohesion, and it would have remained so except for one critical fact: Officer Pedrick did not shoot John Randolph Scott.

      On the morning after the shooting, the medical examiner’s attendants undressed Scott’s body and found a spent .38 slug still lodged in the bloody clothing. That bullet was compared by the ballistics lab later that afternoon, but it could not be matched with Pedrick’s revolver. In fact, the bullet that killed Scott was a 158-grain roundnose, a common type of Smith & Wesson ammunition that hadn’t been used by the police department in more than a decade.

      Worden and several other detectives then returned to the scene of the pursuit and in daylight carefully searched the alley where Pedrick was believed to have fired his weapon. Picking through trash in that alley off Raynor Avenue, they found a mark in the pavement that appeared to have lead residue from a bullet ricochet. The detectives followed the likely trajectory of the slug across the alley and came to an adjacent lot where, incredibly, a resident was cleaning debris on that very morning. Of all the trash-strewn lots in all the ghettos in all the world, Worden thought, this guy’s gotta be cleaning ours. Just as the detectives were about to begin emptying every one of the half-dozen trash bags filled by West Baltimore’s last Good Samaritan, they discovered the spent .38 slug, still partially buried in the dirt lot. Ballistics then matched that bullet to Brian Pedrick’s weapon.

      But if Pedrick wasn’t the shooter, who was?

      Worden had no taste for the obvious answer. He was a cop and he had spent his adult life in the brotherhood of cops—in station houses and radio cars, in courthouse corridors and district lockups. He didn’t want to believe that someone wearing the uniform could be so stupid as to shoot someone and then run away, leaving the body in a back alley like any other murdering bastard. And yet he couldn’t turn away from the fact that John Randolph Scott was killed with a .38 slug while running from men with .38 revolvers. In any other investigation, there would be no debate as to where and how a homicide detective should begin. In any other case, a detective would start with the men who had the guns.

      Worden being Worden, he had done precisely that, compelling nearly two dozen police from three districts to submit their service revolvers to evidence control in exchange for replacement weapons. But for each .38 submitted, a corresponding ballistics report indicated that the fatal bullet had not come from this officer’s duty weapon. Another dead end.

      Was a cop carrying a secondary weapon, another .38 that had since been thrown off some Canton pier? Or maybe the kid was running from police and tried to steal another car, only to get himself shot by some irate civilian who then disappeared into the night. That was a long shot, Worden had to admit, but in this neighborhood nothing was impossible. A more likely scenario had the kid getting aced with a gun of his own, a .38 taken off him in a struggle with an arresting officer. That could explain why the spent bullet wasn’t department issue, just as it could explain the torn buttons.

      Worden and Rick James had recovered four of them at or near the victim’s body. One button appeared to have nothing to do with the victim; three were determined to be from the dead man’s shirt. Two of those buttons were found near the body and were bloodied; the third was found near the mouth of the alley. To Worden and James both, the torn buttons indicated that the victim had been grabbed in a struggle, and the presence of the button near the mouth of the alley suggested that the struggle had begun only a few feet from where the victim fell. More than a straight shooting by a civilian suspect, that scenario suggested an attempted street arrest, an effort to grab or halt the victim.

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