Update, 2:39 p.m.: The police chief in Urbandale, Iowa, confirmed at a press conference that the suspect in Wednesday morning’s shooting is the same Scott Michael Greene who was involved in an altercation outside an Urbandale High School football game in October. Chief Ross McCarty said Greene had been escorted from the game after waving a Confederate flag in front of black students and was given a warning for trespassing. McCarty said Greene’s daughter attends the high school where the incident took place.
A spokesman for the Des Moines Police Department, Sgt. Paul Parizek, confirmed at a press conference that the suspect, as well as both slain officers, were white.
Update, 2:13 p.m: According to USA Today, the second officer killed in Wednesday morning’s attack was in the process of responding to the shooting of the first, which occurred about 20 minutes earlier. Anthony Beminio, a sergeant with the Des Moines Police Department, died at a hospital not long after he was discovered in his car.
Original post: A 46-year-old man was arrested in Iowa on Wednesday for allegedly shooting two police officers in ambush-style attacks overnight.
Authorities believe the two officers were killed around 1 a.m. According to the New York Times, they were found dead in their police cars in the Des Moines suburb of Urbandale, after reports of gunfire led Urbandale police to a street corner near the Des Moines city limits. There, they discovered a young Urbandale officer named Justin Martin, who had been fatally shot while sitting alone in his car. The body of a second officer, who has been identified as Des Moines Sgt. Anthony Beminio, was found about three miles away in his police car. The names of the officers were reported by the Des Moines Register.
Scott Michael Greene was named as a suspect around 7:30 a.m. and taken into custody about two hours later. Authorities told the Washington Post that Greene was walking down a rural road when he asked someone working on their tractor to call the police. A Des Moines police spokesman told the Post that, after officers arrived Wednesday morning, Greene told them he had “an existing medical condition that was flaring up,” and was taken to a hospital. He remains there now, in police custody, but he has not been charged with a crime.
BuzzFeed discovered an extraordinary YouTube video uploaded last month by a user named Scott Greene. The video appears to have been filmed by someone having an argument with police at an Urbandale High School sporting event. The person recording the video—which was uploaded under the heading “Police Abuse, Civil Rights Violation at Urbandale High School 10/14/16”—indicates that he has been thrown out of the event for waving a Confederate battle flag in the stands. Plainly aggrieved, he repeatedly asks the officer who escorted him out what crime he has committed.
In the comments section under the video, the person who uploaded it wrote, a week ago:
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.
The Des Moines Police Department has not confirmed that the person who uploaded the video was the suspect in Wednesday morning’s killings. But a police department spokesman told the Post that police were aware of the incident depicted in the video and would only discuss if it becomes “valuable to the investigation.”
Like the suspect, the two police officers who were killed both appear to have been white.
This post will be updated as more information becomes available.
