85 Shots

It's been a year since Steven "Butter" Miller was killed. Does anyone remember?

by Tom Namako and Doron Taussig

Mark Stehle THOSE LEFT BEHIND: Mayra Rivera, with Aniayha, 6, and Amir, 4, two of the children she had with Steven "Butter" Miller. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Daniel "Scotch" Williams was pacing around his living room, alternately distraught and despondent. Several of his friends were present, seated in a circle; they were not officially in vigil, but might as well have been. The following morning, the group was headed to a funeral. Just four days prior, their good friend Butter had been shot dead by police — shot at 85 times, hit about 20.

When Butter was killed, he was high, standing on a corner and waving a loaded gun. He hadn't pointed it at anyone, or if he had, it had been completely accidental, coincidental, because Butter was blank-eyed, detached from the world. "Steven Miller," as the papers called him, was portrayed as a lunatic, and when he died, certainly, he was. But what Scotch couldn't get his head around was that, as recently as that morning, Butter had been the same guy he'd always been, calling Scotch on the phone, demanding pancakes, then driving from his home in Point Breeze (where he'd eventually be shot down) all the way to Upper Darby to get them. Yes, he was stressed about a couple of things — he had just turned 30, and his rap career still hadn't taken off, which meant he was still on the street in South Philly; there, he'd recently gotten on bad terms with a dangerous young bull, which was why he was suited up the day he died. But the man who, at about 6 p.m., walked outside shirtless and muttering nonsense was not the man who'd come to Scotch's for breakfast that morning. It wasn't the man who called Scotch later that afternoon, to remind him to send out a demo tape.

"Three-forty-three," Scotch said, checking the time of the call in his phone's history. "That's crazy. Three-forty-three."

The other thing Scotch couldn't understand was how the police could shoot at a man 85 times and call it justice. After the shooting, he'd gone to a community meeting where the police commissioner had, in essence, defended the cops. Eighty-five shots!

"It wasn't the fact that he was shot," Scotch said as he paced his l