85 Shots

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

by Tom Namako and Doron Taussig

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Published: Jul 23, 2008

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 living room. "It was how it was done. They did him worse than if he was going through something with someone on the street."

He had settled by his staircase, and there, settled on a final thought:

"They let everyone get all fired up, and then in a week it's, 'Steven Miller who?' Me, I'm never gonna forget. But they probably look at it like, that's one less nigga with a gun."

That was a year ago.

Now, Scotch is sitting in his same living room with his two young daughters, who are watching a remake of the cartoon He-Man. He sends them to watch upstairs, and changes the channel to a movie called 10th and Wolf, a ridiculously violent film set in South Philadelphia.

"As far as the city go," he says, in reference to his prediction a year earlier, "everybody forgot about the whole situation."

Things are going good for Scotch. He has a steady job in medical billing. He's engaged to marry his girl, Lainey. His home in Upper Darby has nice things — a strong air conditioner, a big TV. The kid from Point Breeze is doing well.

But it's also been a rough year. Butter was Scotch's partner. They came up together, rapped together, and though Butter had stayed closer to the street, no distance came between them. After Butter fell, Scotch spent a lot of time in his basement listening to music, shaking his head. He tried to get inside Butter's mind: What happened that day? But the excavations never turned up anything.

He tried to get back into the studio, to keep his crew, DLK (Down Low Killaz), alive. But it was hard.

"How can I go into the studio without my nigga?" he wrote on DLK's MySpace page. "Even on the days I laid solo shit, I could call him up like, 'You wouldn't believe the shit I just laid.' It's like 50% of my motivation died on the day he was told to return to his creator."

When Scotch wasn't enraged, he found himself empty, haunted by an absence.

"Even a lot of his phone calls was just on some bored shit. Like, 'Hey yo, what you doing?' 'Laying back, man, same as you.'"

He shakes his head.

"It's crazy without him."

BUTTER AND SCOTCH: They grew up together, rapped together and just hung out a lot. "It's crazy without him," says Scotch. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Steven Miller, aka Butter Bean, aka Butter, aka Bud, aka Shame, was a fun-loving, hip-hop-loving, lady-loving guy from South Philadelphia. He was raised by his grandmother, Miss Audrey, in and around the Wilson Park homes at Point Breeze and Snyder avenues, and in his teens and early 20s sometimes got in trouble — he spent time in jail on drug charges, and took a bullet on a basketball court that left his left hand numb. He had seven children by three different women — Tamika, Mayra and Chasee — and he loved them all, truly, though the quality of his fathering was of course limited by the fact that he didn't live with all of them, and wasn't a steady provider. His dream was to hit it big, become a rap star, but at the age of 30, he was beginning to consider a life more like Scotch's — maybe not stardom, but not the street, either. In July 2007, he was still living in South Philly, spending much of his time visiting friends and family, making jokes and mooching meals.

Social groups often have central figures, people around whom the life of the network revolves. Butter never seemed like that type — he was too transitory. But after he died, a fairly broad cipher of friends and family that orbited around Taney and Tasker, where Butter lived, fell apart. His father, a man who spent his life on the street, and whom Butter was helping to care for, passed away. Miss Audrey, died, as well. People who had moved away from Point Breeze, like Scotch and Scotch's brother, Anthony Lawrence, stopped visiting as often — so many of their connections were on the strength of Butter. A friend who was locked up, Hassan, said to Anthony: "Ain't no need for me to come home now, what I'm coming home to?" Other friends got booked, sent to jail. And people who lived in the neighborhood, good friends like Donna Smith and LaTae Gans, stopped getting out much. Donna, in stressful spots with men, missed Butter's relationship advice, which he dispensed happily and freely. LaTae just didn't see much point in socializing.

Mayra Rivera, the middle of Butter's three baby-mothers, had lived with Butter for seven years, and had three kids with him. Outgoing like Butter, she was perhaps the only person in his life who could keep pace with his gregariousness. The pair had parted ways when Butter started seeing Chasee ("I just got fed up," Mayra says), but still got together from time to time, and Mayra felt confident that, eventually, Butter would come home and marry her. When he died, her most basic expectations for the rest of her life were dashed: There would be no one to talk to her two sons about girls; no one to teach them about football. In the immediate aftermath of his death, she would walk around her house, and sense his presence, his vibe, as if he were there. She had to go to a therapist, and take medication, to end these perceptions.

A year later, Mayra is sitting on her parents' porch in North Philly. Her three children play on the sidewalk in front of her. The younger boy, 4-year-old Amir, is just like his father, she says — charming and mercurial. Aniayha, age 6, who's been told that her father is in heaven, has taken to declaring that she misses him. Climbing up on the steps to play with her mother's hair, she hears the topic of conversation, and sounds off: "I miss dad!" She does not appear to fully grasp the meaning of her words.

Mayra is doing a bit better now. But she still carries Steven Miller's driver's license, worn and tearing, in her wallet. If she could have done something differently, she says, she would have been with Butter that afternoon.

"I would've just said, 'Give him a glass of milk,'" she says. "'It'll bring his high down.'"

The two mothers of Butter's four other children, Tamika and Chasee, could not be reached and declined to be interviewed for this story, respectively. Chasee's home in South Philly still has pictures of Butter taped up in the window.

I

It should be said that, for several of the people in Butter's circle, losing someone close was not a new experience. Anthony Lawrence, for one, has been counting: The first person in his life to die was a girl he knew in high school, who was killed by a boy she'd broken up with; in the approximately 20 years since, he's seen 33 more deaths. It always hurts. But the way Butter died, his friends say, made his case harder.

There are still about a dozen bullet holes in a stucco wall at the corner of Tasker and Taney streets, the small intersection where Butter was shot down. The holes are about the circumference of a quarter, and an investigator has neatly labeled each: "S3," "S11," "S12.

What happened to Butter, when he walked out of his house with a gun, is as follows: He was surrounded by cops — six of them, on either side of him on Tasker Street. They ordered Butter to drop his weapon, but Butter, far gone, did not. A seventh cop came running up Taney, out of view from the other cops, and unable to see them. He yelled, once, for Butter to drop his weapon, then fired; the officers on Tasker, hearing the shots, opened fire as well. All told, the police unleashed 85 rounds, hitting Butter between 17 and 21 times. Butter never fired his gun.

In the days that followed, Butter's friends and neighbors expressed outrage. Anthony believed the cops knew what they were doing when they lit his friend up. Cops — some of whom are from the neighborhoods they police — know the ways of the street, he said, and were sending a message to the neighborhood by firing so many times. At a community meeting at Vare Recreation Center, a few days after the shooting, then-Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson was shouted down by angry residents who wanted the department to "admit [the cops] were wrong" and punish the officers involved. Not even a forceful monologue by Capt. Kevin Bethel, then the commanding officer of the 17th District — "I'm trying to tell you that I'm trying to stop our kids from killing each other" — could temper the neighborhood's rage.

The department's argument, expressed by Johnson to City Paper, was that the cops were right to shoot — Butter had a gun — and when cops shoot, they aim for center mass, disarming shots being a feat mostly accomplished in movies. He did say he was "concerned" about the number of shots fired. As in all shootings, the officers involved (two of whom suffered friendly-fire graze and shrapnel wounds) were assigned to desk duty, pending an investigation.

A year later, the stucco wall on Taney and Tasker is still pockmarked by bullet holes, and neighbors have been upset to see the officers from the shooting back on the street. Chief Inspector Anthony DiLacqua, from the department's Office of Professional Responsibility, says they were put back on full duty before Commissioner Johnson left office, after receiving additional firearm training and spending time in counseling in the employees' assistance program, "to make sure they can handle being out on the street." The officers are Eric Acevedo, Jacarr Goodmond, Freddie McCrea, Joseph Koger, Santos Higgins, Nicholas Lopez and Brandon Ruff. The Police Department Public Affairs office said it could not approve interviews on an open case.

Tyree Bullock, a friend of Butter's from Taney and Tasker who witnessed the shooting, says when the neighbors see those cops, "it's like, 'Here go this motherfucker.' Some neighbors say it out loud."

As a little kid runs past Butter's old, now vacant house with a toy rifle, Tyree, across the street, says he "never heard nothing" as far anyone coming around to interview him for an investigation. Nor does he know anyone else on the block who did. Latae says she called the police frequently, for a while, but the police "kept giving her the runaround."

"I feel like they felt it was OK for them to do it," Latae says.

Two official investigations of the incident are ongoing — one by the District Attorney's Office, which declined to comment, and one by the Police Office of Professional Responsibility, which can't act until the District Attorney decides whether to press charges.

This is not to say that nothing's changed since the shooting, however. The anger is different than it was before — turned from a blind rage into a familiar, simmering resentment. At the most recent meeting at Vare Recreation Center, Inspector Joseph Mooney of the South Division and local police captains discussed an alleged prostitution ring on Broad Street and a few home thefts. Many residents thanked the police for being responsive in the recent past. Not a word was uttered about Butter's shooting.

Capt. Michael Gillespie, who took over the 17th District when Bethel was promoted to deputy commissioner, says the neighborhood remains challenging: There have been three shootings and one homicide near Tasker and Taney this year. One shooting in the area happened with police cars a block away.

"They knew we were there," he says. "And they did it anyway."

Gillespie, who returned from a tour of duty in Iraq with the Army Reserves in 2005, has, like his predecessor, been trying to improve community policing.

"We're setting up a full town-watch-style program in conjunction with the block captains in each pocket of the district," he says, in a parlance littered with police procedural-speak. "We're trying to identify where we have holes, and we'll go out ourselves and try to recruit people to help be our eyes and ears."

He doesn't think the Miller shooting had a long-lasting impact on neighbor relations. "We like to look at the 'totality of the circumstances,'" he says. "We've seen a lot of promise in this community."

But even amid promise, signs of a profound disconnect linger. On the stucco wall, next to the bullet hole marked "S54" in faded, black marker, the phrase "Fuck the Cops" is still legible.

Whether or not he'd put it that way, Scotch agrees with the sentiment. He had already been plenty skeptical of police accountability, he says; when, this year, the NYPD cops who shot at Sean Bell 50 times got off, and then he saw the video of numerous Philly cops beating three men shortly after a cop was killed on Philly's streets, he lost all hope.

"They whupped them bulls' asses viciously," he says. "At the end of the day, nobody's thinking about it."

His brother, Anthony, has joined him in his living room. They are not yet aware that the cops who shot Butter are back on the street, and Anthony thinks they might somehow be disciplined.

"I think they might lose their jobs," he says. "Not prosecuted. But they might lose their jobs."

Scotch disagrees vehemently.

"You just gotta accept it," he says to his older brother. "It happened, and you gotta live with the fact that nothing's going to happen as far as justice."

His philosophy for dealing with the police?

"You just can't give them a reason," he says.

That's what Scotch has been doing — minding his business, living his life. About six months after Butter died, he decided that, since "it's not like [I] got a DeLorean," he might as well get back in the studio. The first song he put down was a party track, called "Yup." Eventually, he partnered with a guy named Tim, who was engaged to a woman in his circle, and who was, in some ways, reminiscent of Butter — he ad-libbed similarly on tracks, told the same kind of jokes. This brought back hard memories. But Scotch didn't feel bad about it — Butter had wanted him to keep making music, and in any case, that's what happens when someone dies: You go through a rough patch, and then, hopefully, you come to terms with what's happened. Life goes on, just a bit worse than before.

On July 8, the one-year anniversary of Butter's death, Scotch thought about visiting the gravesite, or maybe going down to Tasker Street, but he ended up just staying home and pouring out some liquor. The one thing he still wants to do is put down a memorial track. He already has the concept: He plans to ask all the questions he asked himself after Butter died, and then just talk to his friend, tell him what life has been like over the past year — tell him, for instance, that he's gotten engaged. He wants to do it, and he's sure he will. But he hasn't yet.

"I'm scared to lay it," he says. "I don't know why."

(editorial@citypaper.net)

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