Several weeks ago, a scanner's transcript of the police radio traffic was posted here at FR. You can listen to the copy entered into evidence and posted on the Sun website and decide for yourself how accurate it is.
http://209.157.64.201/focus/f-news/2556714/posts
In any event, that radio traffic does not support your contention that units had been in the parking lot for 30 minutes: you can clearly hear the supervisors in unit 767 directing units to set up a command post and contain the entrances. 2V54 is the first unit to arrive at timestamp 12:07; he is ordered to stop foot traffic in and out of the buisiness, then to contact store security to start evacuations at 14:04. (that's about two minutes after he first arrived at the Costco). 2V16 arrives a minute later, at 14:55.
There is additional traffic between the units arriving at the store, the helicopter, and the supervisors: staging fire, the sergeant ordering units to turn off their lights and sirens prior to arrival to avoid further agitating the suspect, setting up a containment. Dispatch confirms that she is still "landline" with the store manager, and updates the location of the suspect, "is directly in the center of the building", at 18:14.
Adding it up, units had been on scene for six minutes so far. One minute later, at 19:11 2V16 advises "shots fired".
That's less than one minute after being told the suspect was in the center of the store talking to the manager, Seven minutes after the first unit arrived (not 30 minutes), and four minutes after 2V16 arrived.
That timeline is consistent with trying to secure the scene, evacuate the uninvolved and wait, as ordered, for the supervisors to arrive.
Thank you for providing that information.
When I first heard about this, I was told it was 7 minutes from the time cops arrived until they shot him. Then, I listened to the audio tape and in the comments it was reported that the police were there for 30 minutes.
It may be that the time from the reception of the 911 call until the shot were fired was 30 minutes.
Unless I can find different, I stand corrected.
The fact still remains that the Cops on site knew that everyone was being evacuated from the store, including Mr. Scott, and then testified that they weren’t ready when he came out.
The cops had agreed to have the customers evacuated and not to ‘alert’ Mr. Scott. How could they not ‘know’ he was coming ?
Why couldn’t they have just asked him calmly to lie down and wait until their superiors arrived, instead of pointing guns at him and yelling conflicting instructions?