Iowa police killing suspect in custody

UPDATE (12:55 p.m.): Scott Michael Greene, the man suspected in the ambush killings of two Iowa policemen, surrendered to a state Department of Natural Resources officer without incident earlier today, police said. Greene flagged down the officer in Dallas County, west of Des Moines, and was taken into custody without incident. He is getting treatment at a local hospital and has not yet been charged.

Police identified the two victims as Urbandale officer Justin Martin, who joined the force in 2015, and Des Moines Sgt. Anthony Beminio, an 11-year veteran of the department. Martin was single, and Beminio was married with children.

OUR EARLIER REPORT: Police in Des Moines, Iowa, have arrested a suspect in the overnight, ambush-style killings of two police officers. Scott Michael Greene, 47, is suspected in the shootings that happened just after 1 a.m., 2 miles apart. Both officers—one from the city of Des Moines and one from the suburb of Urbandale—were sitting in their patrol cars when they were shot.

Investigators have not yet commented on a possible motive for the shooting. On Oct. 21, a YouTube user named Scott Greene, whose photo resembles the suspect, posted a video of police escorting him out of an Urbandale High School football game for waving a Confederate flag in the stands. In the video description, Greene wrote, “This is an assault on a person exercising his constitution rights on free speech!”

The video shows officers speaking to a man (presumably holding the camera) who claims an African-American person in the stands smacked him from behind and took the flag he was waving during the national anthem. An officer said they would return the flag, but others complained he caused a disturbance in the stadium.

“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,” one officer says. The officers also claim the flag was against school policy and the school is private property.

Police and the man argue about the right to free speech versus causing a disturbance. The encounter, while tense, stays mostly polite and includes no violence or yelling.

Greene was convicted in 2014 after two separate, belligerent encounters, one with police and one with a neighbor, The Des Moines Register reported. In one incident, Greene was accused of shining a flashlight in a man’s eyes, calling him the N-word, and saying, “I will kill you,” according to a police report the Register obtained.

Urbandale Sgt. Chad Underwood said he believes this is the first time an officer in his department has been shot in the line of duty.

Wednesday marked the first time a Des Moines police officer has been shot and killed on duty since 1977, when two died in separate incidents months apart, according to the Iowa Department of Public Safety. With Wednesday’s shootings, 113 officers have died in the line of duty in the United States in 2016, according to preliminary data from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. Fifty-one of those deaths were firearms-related, a spike from last year that the group has blamed on an uptick in ambush-style killings.