Sign up for the paNOW newsletter

Daughter says she’s in shock after dad charged with murder

Nov 4, 2016 | 2:30 AM

DES MOINES, Iowa — The distraught daughter of a man accused of killing two Iowa police officers said Friday that she talked to her father just two hours before the fatal shootings, and it was “the most normal conversation that we’ve ever had.”

Samantha Greene sobbed as she watched her father, Scott Michael Greene, make his first court appearance though a television monitor from jail. The 46-year-old stood silently, staring straight ahead, as the judge set his bond at $10 million on two charges of first-degree murder.

“He’s never once showed any ill action or thought against the police, so it’s complete shock,” the 25-year-old woman said after the hearing, adding that she and her sister wanted to “express our deepest sympathy to the family of the lost and the officers themselves.”

Her father is charged in the deaths of Des Moines Police Sgt. Anthony Beminio and Urbandale Officer Justin Martin. Investigators said the officers were killed early Wednesday while sitting in their patrol cars in separate attacks about 2 miles apart.

Court documents show the shootings occurred just hours after a judge ordered Scott Greene to move out of his mother’s home, saying he had hit and financially exploit his mother. The documents also show he faced intense money problems.

Samantha Greene and her 15-year-old sister met with reporters following the brief court hearing in a small courtroom at the Polk County Jail.

“We do not condone what our father has done. It was a shock to even us that the man we knew so well was capable of doing something so tragic,” she said.

She said she talked with her father on the phone around 11 p.m. Tuesday. She declined to detail what they discussed, but described her father as compassionate and nurturing. She said he had shown no recent indications of anger or irritation, but that he had recently been upset at losing his father to cancer and the end of a relationship.

Witnesses reported seeing Scott Greene flee in a truck from where Martin’s car was parked after hearing gunshots around 1 a.m. Wednesday in Urbandale, a suburb of Des Moines, according to documents filed by the Polk County Attorney’s Office.

The documents say Greene encountered Beminio at an intersection in Des Moines just four minutes later, not 20 minutes as investigators previously said. Beminio was stopped facing eastbound at a stop sign when Greene “turned westbound, stopped and without hesitation discharged multiple rounds into the driver side door area of the fully marked squad car,” the documents allege.

The truck, a high-powered rifle and other evidence was found in a rural area northwest of Des Moines, near where Greene turned himself in to an employee of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources Wednesday afternoon.

Greene was assigned a public defender during Friday’s court hearing. The judge also informed him that the two murder charges he faces carry maximum mandatory life prison sentences.

A preliminary hearing, where Greene will likely enter a plea, was scheduled for Nov. 14.

Funeral services are scheduled for Monday for Beminio and Tuesday for Martin. A national charity, the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, said it will donate funds to the families of both officers, and pay off the mortgage on the home owned by Beminio.

David Pitt, The Associated Press