We now have the most complete picture, to date, of how eye witnesses observed Che Taylor being shot and killed by two Seattle police officers last February. As the King County inquest into the shooting continued yesterday, the second of the officers involved in the incident, Scott Miller, testified and described his belief that Taylor was in the process of pulling a gun on the two officers when they shot him.

Miller and his partner, SPD Officer Michael Spaulding (who testified on Friday), claim that they opened fire on Taylor because they feared he was about to shoot them.

But Miller's testimony yesterday revealed that 45 minutes passed between the moment when he first spotted Taylor carrying what he believed to be a holstered handgun and the moment when he and Officer Spaulding opened fire on Taylor, killing the 46-year-old black man.

Both Miller and Spaulding testified that they shot Taylor without seeing the gun itself; only a movement of Taylor’s arm indicated to them that he was unholstering a handgun.

“I did not see his right hand, it was concealed on his hip but what I saw was his right elbow. It was moving at a vertical motion directly upwards,” Miller said yesterday. “That it is a tell-tale symbol, an indicator of someone whom is armed with a gun and drawing a gun.”

The two officers were staking out a person unrelated to Taylor when they first encountered him. While they were doing surveillance on that person’s apartment, they saw Taylor park thirty feet away from their undercover car. Miller testified that he then saw Taylor, who they knew to be a convicted who could not legally possess a firearm, get out of his vehicle with a holstered handgun on his right hip. Spaulding, who was sitting next to Miller at the time, said he did not see the holstered handgun.

The two officers lost contact with Taylor for an extended period of time following that first sighting. Taylor then walked into an apartment, exited the apartment, left the scene in a white sedan and returned to the scene in that vehicle before the two officers made contact with him. Both officers maintain that they did not see the handgun after Miller’s initial sighting.

The existence of the handgun has, however, been corroborated by multiple witnesses. Miller and a back-up police officer testified that they saw the handgun sitting on the floorboards of the sedan immediately after Taylor was shot; a fire department official testified that he cut a holster off Taylor while administering aid at the scene; and crime scene investigators found the weapon in the car in a search after the car was impounded.

The two officers have testified that they shot Taylor because he was not following commands to show his hands and get on the ground. But James Bible, an attorney representing the Taylor family at the hearing, has questioned whether Taylor could have complied with the two officers’ commands to get on the ground given that a car door was directly in front of Taylor and Spaulding was directly behind Taylor.

Miller testified that Taylor could have fired at the officers if they let him turn and face him.

Miller: Given the totality of the circumstances, knowing that his arm was pulling a handgun and him turning towards us could have potentially given him a better firing platform to shoot at us.

Bible: So, he couldn’t have turned and gone down, because you perceived him as a threat?

Miller: He couldn’t turn because he had drawn a handgun.

Bible: Oh, that handgun that you didn’t actually see in his hand?

Miller: Yes.

Bible: That handgun you didn’t actually see him point at anyone?

Miller: That’s the handgun.

Bible: The handgun you allegedly saw 45 minutes earlier?

Miller: That’s the handgun.”

Spaulding shot six shots towards Taylor with his rifle and Miller fired one shot with his shotgun.

The inquest hearing, which is not a civil or a criminal proceeding but rather a fact-finding hearing called by King County Executive Dow Constantine, will continue this week with crime scene investigators and a medical examiner expected to give testimony Wednesday. The jury assembled for the hearing will answer a series of yes or no questions at the end of the hearing, and those answers will factor into the county prosecutor’s decision on whether to seek any charges against the two officers.