Just before dawn on a cold April Saturday, Officers Thomas Shea and Walter Scott were patrolling the neighborhood of South Jamaica, Queens, where a rash of parked cars had recently been broken into and stripped for parts. But after a graveyard shift cruising the 103rd Precinct on plainclothes “anti-crime” patrol, Shea and Scott had little to show for their efforts, beyond their discovery of yet another burgled vehicle. Their frustration ticked up when they fielded reports of a taxi carjacking in the area, carried out, according to the radio dispatcher, by “two male Negroes” “twenty-three, twenty-four years of age,” with “possibly a gun.” That car, too, was found abandoned. Jolted out of the humdrum torpor of neighborhood patrol duty, the two white cops were en route back to the station when, near the intersection of 112th Road and New York Boulevard, Scott caught sight of two pedestrians and pulled the car alongside them.

“I got out of the car, identified myself as a cop, and flashed my shield,” Shea later explained, first to other cops on the scene, and then, in more or less the same language, in court. According to him, one of the pedestrians retorted, “Fuck you, you’re not taking me,” and fled with his companion into a nearby vacant lot. Shea chased them until, in his account, the man who had cursed him drew a revolver, at which point Shea was obliged to fire “in self-defense.” As the wounded man fell, he somehow managed to hand the gun to the second pedestrian. Or perhaps he “tossed” it to him. Or maybe he dropped it, and the other pedestrian “bent over to take it”—Shea and Scott described what happened variously and contradictorily. Scott, for his part, confirmed that Shea fired in self-defense, as the first pedestrian spun toward him, gun in hand. Scott also insisted that the second pedestrian used the gun to take a shot at him, causing Scott to return fire himself. Despite Scott’s efforts to pursue the second man, both by car and on foot, his quarry somehow managed to escape, abandoning his fallen companion and ditching the gun along the way.

From the start, Shea’s and Scott’s accounts seemed dubious. First off, the blocking and timeline didn’t make sense. How could Scott have been pursuing the second pedestrian with the car one moment, but have had a clear view of all Shea’s actions at the next? Moreover, even though Shea and Scott both insisted the men had had at least one revolver between them, exhaustive searches of the area yielded nothing. Scott testified that he’d only noticed the pedestrians because their outfits were supposedly the same color as the clothes worn by the alleged carjackers’—but also that the only real “color” he’d seen was that of their skin. In fact, skin color was the only thing he’d clocked—not their age, their height, or their build. “I didn’t notice the size,” he said, “but the color was right.”

Scott and Shea, in other words, offered accounts that vacillated between absolute certainty and extraordinary vagueness. They were certain the pedestrians had a gun, and certain they’d been compelled to shoot in self-defense. On all other counts, they were terrifically inexact. To be sure, as police tactical trainers are quick to insist, violence can unfold with bewildering speed. Forensic psychologists have documented how memories of trauma can be fragmented and partial, at once hyperrealistic in some details and blank in others. But in the case of Scott and Shea, whose accounts flexibly corroborated each other’s, the combination of confidence and ignorance was suspiciously convenient, because the human being they killed was not a profane, defiant, twentysomething carjacker. He was a 10-year-old boy named Clifford Glover, five feet tall and less than a hundred pounds.

Clifford’s stepfather, Add Armstead, worked an early morning shift at a nearby junkyard, and took Clifford, an aspiring junior mechanic, with him to work on Saturdays. According to Armstead, the plainclothes officers had rolled up without identifying themselves, and Shea had yelled “You black son of a bitch!” as he exited the vehicle, gun in hand. Armstead had just been paid the day before, and had some cash on him; he testified that he believed the white men in street clothes were after him and his money, not the child. The pair fled. When Shea shot Clifford, Armstead, distraught, ran through the streets until he flagged down a squad car driven by a pair of uniformed officers, who searched him and drove him back to the scene. There, as the sun rose, Clifford lay dying. An autopsy revealed that a bullet had struck him from behind, almost exactly in the middle of his back, punching through one of his lungs, shattering ribs, and shredding a major artery on the way out. The slug’s angle of entry made it effectively impossible that Clifford had been shot while turning around, drawing a gun or otherwise.