http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/us/keith-scott-charlotte-police-shooting.html 2016-09-21 18:27:42 Gun Is Found After Fatal Police Shooting of Black Man, Charlotte Chief Says The chief said that the man who was shot had brandished the gun at officers, and that the book the man’s family said he was carrying had not been found. === CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Kerr Putney, the chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina, said Wednesday that officers had found the gun that the police say a black man had brandished before “He did have a weapon when he exited the vehicle,” Chief Putney said. “Officers were giving loud, clear verbal commands. The suspect exited the vehicle with a handgun, threatening officers.” Family members of the man who was shot, Keith L. Scott, 43, have said that he was unarmed, and was holding only a book. But Chief Putney said at a news conference on Wednesday morning, “We did not find a book.” On Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, protesters blocked Interstate 85 and looted material from a tractor-trailer before setting the cargo ablaze, Chief Putney said. Other demonstrators threw rocks at officers, causing at least 16 injuries and damage to several police cars. The police made one arrest and used tear gas to disperse protesters. The protests had begun peacefully, the chief said, but “when that behavior becomes violent,” officers had been compelled to respond more aggressively. Under a sprinkling of rain on Wednesday morning, a handful of men wearing “stop the violence” T-shirts walked the parking lot of the apartment complex where the shooting occurred. One woman screamed curses at gathered reporters and insisted that Mr. Scott had been unarmed. A helicopter flew over the complex, near the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Attorney General Loretta Lynch Chief Putney said that the shooting occurred on Tuesday just before 4 p.m., when officers arrived at the apartment complex to serve a warrant on a resident. While there, the officers saw Mr. Scott step out of a car, armed with a gun, the chief said. The officers ordered Mr. Scott to drop the weapon, and when he did not, Chief Putney said, he was shot. The chief said that police investigators were reviewing video from officers’ body cameras, but that he did not believe that Brentley Vinson, the officer who killed Mr. Scott, was wearing a camera at the time of the shooting. Officer Vinson has been placed on administrative leave, the department said. The protests began in the University City neighborhood in northeast Charlotte, near the University of North Carolina at Charlotte campus. WSOC-TV reported that looters later moved off the highway and tried to break into a Walmart before officers arrived in force to keep them out, and at least one family driving on Interstate 85 reported that their car’s windshield had been shattered by demonstrators throwing rocks. In a series of “The community deserves answers and full investigation will ensue,” Ms. Roberts wrote. “Will be reaching out to community leaders to work together.” Although their accounts sometimes diverged, members of Mr. Scott’s family generally told local news outlets that he had not had a weapon. Instead, they said, he had been clutching a book while waiting to pick up a child after school. The shooting revived scrutiny of a police department that drew national attention about three years ago when a white officer was quickly charged with voluntary manslaughter after he killed Jonathan Ferrell, an unarmed black man. The shooting in Charlotte this week was the latest in a string of deaths of black people at the hands of the police that have stoked outrage around the country. It came just a few days after a white police officer in Tulsa, Okla., fatally In Charlotte, dozens of chanting demonstrators, some of them holding signs, began gathering near the site of the shooting on Tuesday evening. Around 10 p.m., the Police Department wrote “Demonstrators surrounded our officers who were attempting to leave scene,” the department said. It identified Officer Vinson, an employee since July 2014, as the officer who had fired his weapon. Officer Vinson is black, according to local reports. According to the department, officers saw Mr. Scott leave a vehicle with a weapon soon after they arrived at the apartment complex. “Officers observed the subject get back into the vehicle, at which time they began to approach the subject,” the department said in its first statement about the shooting. “The subject got back out of the vehicle armed with a firearm and posed an imminent deadly threat to the officers, who subsequently fired their weapon, striking the subject.” On Facebook, a woman who identified herself as Mr. Scott’s daughter said the police had fired without provocation. “The police just shot my daddy four times for being black,” the woman said moments into a Facebook Live broadcast that lasted about an hour. Later in the broadcast, she learned that her father had died and speculated that the police were planting evidence. In the September 2013 case involving Mr. Ferrell, officials