Jake Gardner, the white bar owner who shot and killed James Scurlock, a 22-year-old Black protester, on the second night of unrest in Omaha — Saturday, May 30 — wasn’t one of them.
Within just 36 hours of the shooting, Douglas County prosecutor Don Kleine announced that criminal charges would not be filed, finding that Gardner — a 38-year-old ex-Marine with an expired concealed carry permit — had shot Scurlock in self-defense. Gardner, who’d been taken into police custody for questioning the night of the shooting, was released the following night without even being booked into the jail.
The move was, predictably, met with backlash, fueling more protests, including outside Kleine’s house. Within days, under pressure from community leaders, Kleine agreed to call for a grand jury to review the case, while still maintaining that he believed he’d made the right decision. A special prosecutor has since been appointed, though it’s unclear when exactly the investigation will begin, as the process of convening a grand jury is reportedly expected to take a couple of months due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The quick decision not to file charges in the context of this shooting was viewed by many in the community as an example of the ingrained racism within the criminal justice system that has been the subject of nationwide protests, including the one Scurlock had participated in the night he was killed. And while Kleine’s call to convene a grand jury has been welcomed by Scurlock’s family and community leaders alike, many in Omaha have been left feeling angry and disappointed by what they view as a failure by local law enforcement to consider all pertinent evidence and information, including Gardner’s background and reputation, before apparently siding with his version of events and letting him go.
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As Omaha braced for protests on the last Saturday in May, Alayna Melendez wasn’t sure she wanted to attend. Melendez, 19, had participated in the previous night’s demonstrations, which had quickly gone from peaceful to chaotic and violent, with reports of windows broken and bottles thrown at police, and pepper balls and rubber bullets in response. Melendez heard rumors that far-right groups and anarchists were intending to incite violence. She said she even told friends earlier in the day that she was worried “someone’s going to get shot.”
But one of Melendez’s friends, a photographer, was eager to go and take pictures, so she relented. The plan, she told Yahoo News, was to take photos, support the cause, “but not really get too involved.”
Not only did Melendez’s fears prove to be eerily accurate, but she would end up being at the center of an altercation that ended in Scurlock’s death. Melendez says she’d never met Scurlock before, nor did she know anything about Jake Gardner. She says she encountered both men for the first time that night when, as she and many other protesters made their way downtown, she heard someone yell, “He’s got a gun!”
Melendez approached a crowd of people that had gathered outside a nearby bar and saw a man (who would later be identified as Gardner) with a gun in his hand, waving it around.
“I was taught gun rules from a very young age,” said Melendez. “My grandpa told me never to point a gun at anybody, even a BB gun.”
In video footage from the scene, Melendez can be seen standing behind Gardner. She was, she said, contemplating how to disarm him.
“I thought, I need to take this man down,” she said.
Melendez, who weighs 130 pounds and is 5 feet 3 “on a good day,” says she had never tried to wrestle a gun from anyone before. But as soon as Gardner placed the gun back in his waistband, she saw an opening, grabbed him from behind and brought him to the ground, landing in a puddle in the street.
With the young woman on his back, Gardner quickly fired what the county attorney would later describe as “two warning shots.” Melendez said it took her a second to register that the loud noise was not the flash-bangs police had been throwing to disperse crowds. “As soon as I realized they were gunshots, I ran away,” she said.
Video footage shows Gardner briefly standing up before he is tackled to the ground again, this time by Scurlock. Within seconds, Gardner shoots Scurlock in the clavicle, then stands up and walks back toward the bar as protesters and police begin gathering around the young man bleeding in the street.
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Originally Posted by Brian4Liberty
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