Keith Lamont Scott was born February 3, 1973. He was married to Rakeyia Scott. They had seven children together. He had survived a serious accident that left him with brain damage and made communication difficult - the kind of injury that affects how a person responds to commands, how quickly they process loud voices, how they move when they are frightened. His neighbors at the Village at College Downs knew him as someone who sat in his truck and read books while he waited for his son to come home from school. Charlotte had thousands of fathers doing exactly the same thing that afternoon. He was the one a police bullet found.

Rakeyia Scott was on the scene. She filmed part of what happened on her cell phone. "He better not be fucking dead," she shouted at the officers in the footage. "He better not be fucking dead." She would later say, in a statement to the press: "He had no gun. He was not a threat. He was just not a threat, period. He didn't have a gun, he wasn't a threat. What is your purpose? What was your reasoning?" The family said Keith was holding a book. The police said he was holding a gun. The official report eventually concluded the gun was real and loaded. The book was never produced as evidence. Two truths in tension - one from the wife who watched him die, one from the institution that killed him - and a family who had to bury him while both versions argued in public.

Within hours of the shooting, Charlotte residents began gathering in the University City neighborhood and then Uptown to demand accountability. The protests over the next three nights drew thousands - clergy, civil rights leaders, ordinary Charlotteans who had been waiting too long for this conversation. Most marchers were peaceful. Some property was damaged. On the second night, September 21, 26-year-old Justin Carr was shot and killed during the Uptown protests; Rayquan Borum was later convicted of his murder and sentenced to roughly 25 years (276 to 344 months) in prison. Governor Pat McCrory declared a state of emergency and deployed the North Carolina National Guard and Highway Patrol. The Charlotte light rail suspended service. By Thursday, Mayor Jennifer Roberts imposed a citywide midnight curfew. The protests, despite the violence that punctuated some nights, were fundamentally an act of civic insistence: that a city which had let earlier shootings fade out of memory should not be allowed to let this one. The right to protest the killing of a Black man by police was, and is, a right the First Amendment protects.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, and the U.S. Department of Justice all opened inquiries. Officer Vinson was placed on paid administrative leave. CMPD initially declined to release the dashcam and body camera footage, despite pressure from clergy, the ACLU, NAACP president William J. Barber II, and Scott's family. The department eventually released the videos. The dashcam shows Scott exiting his vehicle and walking backward, hands at his sides, when Vinson fired. Audio is missing from the first thirty seconds of the body camera because the officer had not activated it. In November 2016, Mecklenburg District Attorney Andrew Murray announced his office would not charge Vinson, concluding the shooting was justified. The report stated that the gun recovered at the scene was loaded, that Scott's DNA was on it, that an ankle holster was found, and that surveillance video earlier the same day appeared to show Scott's pants bulging at the ankle. The book the family described was not recovered. Whether justice was served is a question the legal system answered one way and many Charlotte residents answered another. The two answers continue to coexist.

September 20, 2016 sits in Charlotte's modern memory the way other dates sit in other American cities - as a hinge. The Bank of America that closed its Uptown offices on the second night of unrest is the same Bank of America whose stadium hosts seventy-five thousand fans on Sundays. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department changed body camera policies after Scott's shooting; CMPD officers had been wearing cameras since 2015, but the policies governing when those cameras were on - and what counted as a violation - were tightened. Keith Lamont Scott's name became part of the national list that Black Americans have been compelled to keep memorizing: Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, and on. His wife Rakeyia, in the days after his death, asked Charlotte to protest peacefully and not in his name to hurt others. The city, mostly, listened. The seven children who lost their father did not get him back. The protests demanded that the next family at the next apartment complex be treated differently. Whether they have been is a question the next September will keep asking.