Suspect in the killing of two Iowa officers has a history of racist incidents and clashes with police

Authorities apprehended Scott Michael Greene, the suspect in the early morning killings of two Des Moines-area police officers on Nov. 2.

By Matt Pearce and Jaweed Kaleem

Nov. 2, 2016 2:43 AM PT

Reporting from Des Moines — An Iowa man with a history of confrontations with the law is suspected of ambushing and killing two Des Moines-area police officers in separate shootings early Wednesday morning.

Officials have not given a possible motive for the attacks, but the suspect had recently complained about police ejecting him from a local high school football game for waving a Confederate flag at black attendees during the national anthem.

For the record:

7:02 p.m. Aug. 22, 2019

An earlier version of this article identified the suspect as Sean Michael Greene. His name is Scott Michael Greene.

Scott Michael Greene, 46, was detained without incident on a rural road after flagging down a state Department of Natural Resources employee and asking the employee to call 911, said Des Moines Police Sgt. Paul Parizek.

Greene was taken to an unidentified hospital after complaining of a health problem and has not been formally arrested or even interviewed, Parizek said at a televised news conference late Wednesday morning.

The shooting prompted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to cancel a rally in Des Moines scheduled Wednesday, and President Obama called the attacks “shameful” and hailed the officers’ service.

Des Moines Police Sgt. Anthony “Tony” Beminio and Urbandale Police Officer Justin Martin “represented our best, most decent instincts as human beings – to serve our neighbors, to put ourselves in harm’s way for someone else,” Obama said in a statement. “They knew the dangers of their job. They knew the risks. Yet they chose to dedicate themselves to those values anyway.”

Investigators are still reconstructing how Martin and Beminio were shot as they sat in their squad cars while on patrol about two miles apart, near the western outskirts of Des Moines.

Officers found the Urbandale officer at 1:06 a.m., and then found the Des Moines officer about 20 minutes later, with both men still sitting in their cars. Officials suspect the officers were caught by surprise and probably hadn’t interacted with the gunman before they were shot.

Greene, who was apparently on foot, is suspected of firing at least 15 rounds from a .223-caliber rifle into the side of Martin’s stopped vehicle as Martin, a rookie in his early 20s, waited at an intersection, said Urbandale Police Chief Ross McCarty.

“I don’t think he ever may have been aware there was a gunman next to him,” said McCarty.

Urbandale resident Russell Cheatem told the Des Moines Register that he saw the gunman walk away and get into a truck after shooting Martin on the street outside Urbandale High School. When Cheatem walked over to Martin’s cruiser, “I pulled the door open and realized there was nothing I could do for him.”

Cheatem said he heard a few more shots a few minutes later, presumably of Beminio getting shot. “It was the exact same — pow, pow, pow, pow, pow — rapid fire,” Cheatem told the newspaper.

Martin probably didn’t know Greene, but other Urbandale officers did, McCarty said.

Greene, who is white, had a history of racist incidents that brought police scrutiny, most recently an Oct. 14 episode in which Urbandale police ejected him from an Urbandale High School football game after he allegedly waved a Confederate flag during the national anthem. Officials said his daughter attends the school.

In videos uploaded to YouTube last month on an account under Greene’s name, Greene, wearing camouflage, can be seen carrying a Confederate flag and an American flag in front of several black women and later arguing with police officers who told him to leave.

In a comment under his video, the owner of the account wrote: “I was offended by the blacks sitting through our anthem. Thousands more whites fought and died for their freedom. However this is not about the Armed forces, they are cop haters.”

Q&A: What we know about ambush cop killings »

Greene complained that officers were violating his constitutional rights.

“I did not want to cause any disruption. I was peacefully protesting,” Greene told the officers in the video, complaining that a black person had smacked him in the head from behind and that someone had snatched a flag out of his hands.

The officers were initially hesitant to take an assault report from Greene, telling him that he was causing a disturbance and that he had to get off school property, as his flag violated school policy, according to the video.

“You have to understand, in the current social climate that we’re in, when you fly a Confederate flag, standing in front of several African American people, that’s going to cause a disturbance, OK, whether you intended to or not,” an officer told Greene.

Greene pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in a 2014 incident in which he resisted Urbandale police trying to pat him down for a weapon, according to the Des Moines Register.

Days later, he was accused of accosting a black man in a parking lot, flashing a flashlight into his eyes, calling him the N-word, and threatening to kill him, according to the Register. Greene was charged with first-degree harassment, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to a year of probation, the newspaper reported.

Greene also had a scheduled court appearance Tuesday stemming from a conflict with his mother, according to McCarty.

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Police officers gather evidence at the scene of a shooting on Wednesday in Urbandale, Iowa. Two Des Moines-area police officers were shot to death early Wednesday in ambush-style attacks while they were sitting in their patrol cars, authorities said.