Des Moines police say an Iowa man suspected of fatally shooting two police officers early Wednesday morning while they sat in their patrol cars is in custody, according to reports. The suspected shooter appears to be a right-wing hard-liner who was asked by police to leave a local sporting event last month where he waved a Confederate flag.
Scott Michael Greene, 46, of Urbandale, Iowa, was apprehended on foot at around 8:50 a.m., the Washington Post reports. The officers were shot shortly after 1 a.m. in what the Des Moines Police Department described as “ambush-style attacks.”
Police spokesman Sgt. Pat Parizek did not put forward a potential motivation for the shooting, but reports show that Greene may have been upset about not being allowed to fly a Confederate flag at Des Moines’ Urbandale High School, near where one of the officers was killed on Wednesday.
“A video uploaded to YouTube last month by an account named Scott Greene was titled “Police Abuse, Civil Rights Violation at Urbandale High School” and appeared to show a person recording the footage arguing with police officers asking him to leave the area. In the video, the man recording the footage, who is identified by one officer as Greene, is heard telling the police that he was assaulted and almost mugged while “peacefully protesting” at what appears to be a high school. An officer is later seen explaining that the Confederate battle flag he was waving violated the school’s code.”
A second, still-image video appears to show Greene flying a Confederate flag at a sporting event.
Greene also owed nearly $200,000 in debt and filed for bankruptcy in 2007; and records suggest he had been charged with first-degree harassment in 2014, Buzzfeed reports. Greene reportedly used a racial slur and told a man “I will kill you.” “Two months later, on June 30, Greene appeared to negotiate a voluntary plea deal for second-degree harassment and was sentenced to one year in jail, according to Buzzfeed. “The judge suspended his jail sentence to time served and was then placed on 1 year probation.”
"On July 7, five police officers were gunned down in Dallas by Micah X. Johnson, an Army veteran who was angered at police treatment of African-Americans. Ten days later, three officers were shot and killed in Baton Rouge, La., by Gavin Long, who had a history of paranoid rantings. The killings in Iowa also recalled the ambush-style killings of police officers in Brooklyn in December 2014, when two police officers sitting in a patrol car were shot at point-blank range."
