Robert Capa’s famous 1936 photograph of a Spanish militiaman purports to record such a moment: The militiaman falls backward on a sunlit battlefield, his body accelerating to meet its shadow. The photograph is contested now — was it staged, or was it truly caught, by serendipity and skill, in the heat of battle? — but it is an image that, for its time, is imaginable. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, to make a picture like it half a century earlier. And by 32 years later, in a world full of small cameras and quick-loading film, there is no longer any doubt that death can be photographed candidly. On a street in Saigon, the American photojournalist Eddie Adams clicks the shutter and captures the precise moment at which Nguyen Ngoc Loan, a South Vietnamese general, fatally shoots Nguyen Van Lem, a Viet Cong commander, in the head. A second before the bullet hits Lem, his face is relaxed. Then the shot — simultaneously of the gun and the camera — but there’s no blood, no splatter, only Lem’s face contorted in mortal agony. A second later he’s on the ground, blood gushing out of his head. We know these things because the execution was also captured on film, by Vo Suu, a cameraman for NBC. Suu’s footage is invaluable, but Adams’s picture, more striking and more iconic, earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1969. The picture was remarkable for the rarity of its achievement, in recording the last moment, unscripted and hardly anticipated, of someone’s life. But when you see death mediated in this way, pinned down with such dramatic flair, the star is likely to be death itself and not the human who dies. The fact that a photograph exists of a man being shot in the head in Vietnam is easier to remember than Lem’s biography or even his name.

Having watched the video of Scott’s death once, I now watched it a second time, to figure out where exactly it had been made. I was in Columbia, S.C., for work, and friends there had driven me to North Charleston. Michael Slager stopped Scott in the parking lot of Advance Auto Parts on Remount Road and asked him some questions. At some time during the interaction, Scott fled. Where to? We found the parking lot. I went on foot, taking a left down Craig Road, following the route of the chase, a minute’s walk, shorter if one were to run. Below a hand-painted sign for a Mega Pawn shop was a narrow, disused lot with a pale storage building on one side and a row of trees on the other, a scene both derelict and bucolic. At the entrance to the lot were a new chain secured by a new padlock, and a bunch of flowers, now drooping, wrapped in plastic and wedged into a chain-link fence. This was the officer’s point of view as he steadied himself, raised his .45-caliber Glock 21 and fired eight times at the back of the man running away from him.