Family of slain Seneca teenager struggles for public attention

Zachary Hammond, a white teenager, pulled up to a drive-through window last week at a Hardee’s restaurant in Seneca, in South Carolina’s Upstate. A sting operation was underway, with police officers suspecting a possible drug deal.

Within minutes, an officer used his patrol car to block Hammond’s vehicle. According to the Oconee County coroner’s report, the officer then “felt threatened” as Hammond drove his car toward him. The officer fired two shots through the open window on the driver’s side, striking Hammond once in the shoulder and once fatally in the chest.

Eric S. Bland, the Columbia lawyer for the Hammond family, has demanded that members of the media treat the killing of Hammond as they have recent shootings of unarmed black men, and some supporters on social media agree.

The national debate over the police and race has grown in the year since Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, on Aug. 9, as the shootings of black men have been elevated in the public eye by body cameras, dashboard camera footage, security cameras and cell phone video.

The firsthand footage has generated protest and social media campaigns such as #blacklivesmatter.

But the police shooting of Hammond on July 26 has so far drawn little of the same public attention, in part because of a lack of video footage.

Thom Berry, a spokesman for the S.C. Law Enforcement Division, which has been charged with conducting an independent investigation, said Friday there was dashboard video camera footage in the Hammond shooting.

“At some point in time, it will become a public record,” he said.

He did not say when.

Bland said the Hammond family obtained an independent autopsy that shows the young man was shot with the .45 caliber handgun in the back left shoulder and the left side of his chest: a distinction that is not in the official autopsy and one that he said dashed the impression that the officer was going to be hit by the car.

The report by the county coroner, Karl E. Addis, has ruled Hammond’s death a homicide.

Bland said the teenager’s death had fallen through the cracks of public discourse over police killings and race and suggested it was because it was a “white-on-white” shooting. In the shooting of “every kid who is black or white,” he said, “everybody should be equally offended.”

On social media, Zachary Hammond’s death spawned calls for all officers to be required to wear body cameras as well as questions about whether the movement to protest police shootings was applied equally across racial lines.

The statements from Addis indicated that the coroner did not know what position Hammond’s body was in when he was shot.

Bland, the lawyer, said drug paraphernalia was found in the car, which could bring a misdemeanor charge for which a fine is paid.