US police urged to release video of Fil-Am shooting

MANILA, Philippines - US police were urged to release as soon as possible the footage of the fatal shooting of a Filipino-American woman in a wholesale store in Virginia last week.

In the June 2 editorial  titled “An Unexplained Death at Costco,” the Washington Post asked if the death of Mylene de Leon-Scott, an immigrant from the Philippines described as a tiny woman, barely over five feet tall and not much more than 100 pounds, was necessary.

“When a pair of Loudoun County sheriff’s deputies encountered her last Wednesday, behaving erratically and wielding a long-bladed knife and scissors at a Costco in Sterling where she worked, they evidently considered her menacing. In the ensuing confrontation, which may have lasted just a few seconds, she was shot to death by one of the deputies,” the editorial said.

Saying there was “no shortage of witnesses” in the Costco incident besides the store’s internal security video, the editorial noted, “Authorities would be well advised to release whatever footage of the incident exists as soon as possible.”

Failure to do so would “only invite further questions, and suspicions, about the prudence of the deputies’ actions and the circumstances of Ms. Scott’s death,” the editorial added.

The editorial said county sheriff Michael Chapman seemed to think his deputies had no choice but to shoot the 38-year-old woman, a pizza server.

Based on what he acknowledged as preliminary information, Chapman said the officers acted according to procedure in justified self-defense when Scott came at them with the knife, according to the editorial.

“Nonetheless, the sheriff’s statement seems not just preliminary but premature. By his own account, something did go badly wrong. Specifically, he said, when one officer attempted to use a Taser to subdue Ms. Scott, it didn’t work,” the editorial said.

“That’s curious and concerning. It’s also unclear. Did the officer who fired the Taser miss Ms. Scott? Did the device malfunction? Was Ms. Scott somehow, unlikely as it seems, impervious to the electroshock?” it added.

Philippine Ambassador to the US Jose Cuisia Jr. raised the possibility that the deputies used excessive force and called for a “thorough, impartial and expeditious investigation” into the incident.

In a statement, Cuisia said the embassy “shares the concerns expressed by Scott’s family in the Philippines and the members of the Filipino-American community that law enforcement officials may have responded with disproportionate force.”

The embassy, quoting a statement released by the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office, said Scott allegedly refused to heed repeated orders from two responding police officers for her to drop a knife and a pair of scissors that she was supposedly using to threaten store employees with.

The statement said that when Scott moved toward the two officers, a Taser electroshock device was used in an attempt to immobilize her but the weapon supposedly failed to deploy. It was at this point that one of the officers fired multiple shots at her. Scott died at the scene while one of the officers sustained a bullet wound but was later released from the hospital.