"As the Senate race intensifies, Fetterman will have to confront an incident from his past that could undermine the liberal-everyman authenticity he’s cultivated. In recent weeks, the lieutenant governor’s critics and rivals have drawn new attention to a 2013 episode in which he chased down a Black man and pointed a shotgun at him. They say Fetterman’s behavior was racist and reckless; he says it was a panicked attempt to fulfill his responsibility as Braddock’s chief law-enforcement officer. He acted, instead of simply calling the police, because he was frantic, he says. He thought there was going to be another school shooting, and he couldn’t have lived with himself if that had happened and he hadn’t done anything."
Here’s what the police report, written by the officers who arrived on the scene, says: “We noticed that in [Fetterman’s] right hand he was holding a black shotgun and his truck was parked in the middle of the street. He had with him a Black male.” The report identifies the man as Christopher Miyares, and notes that Fetterman was yelling about hearing gunshots in the area. (The report also states that two other people “heard several shots.”) “Fetterman continued to yell and state that he knows this male was shooting, but did not see Miyares holding a gun or shooting a gun.” The report notes that Miyares was wearing headphones and running clothes. He was upset, and said that he had seen fireworks in the sky as he was jogging. Later, Miyares said that Fetterman had pointed the shotgun at his chest. “Miyares was very cooperative but was upset Fetterman pulled a shotgun on him,” the police report says.
I was unable to reach Miyares for comment, but he gave his account of the incident on local news in 2013. “He jumped in his Ford F-150 and followed me into North Braddock and pulled a shotgun and aimed it at my chest,” Miyares told a TV reporter. He blamed the noise that Fetterman had heard on children in a nearby parking lot. “They were just shooting off bottle rockets.”
The way Fetterman tells the story, he was outside his home with his young son when he heard the unmistakable sound of gunshots. Almost without thinking, he rushed his son inside, then jumped in his pickup truck, speeding in the direction of the school, convinced another school shooting was coming. He had a shotgun under his seat, and he got it ready. He saw a man in a tracksuit running on the sidewalk, suspected him of the shooting, shouted at him to stop, and showed off his gun. He says he crouched down in the truck’s cabin as he poked the gun up, thinking, Please don’t let me die, terrified that the assault rifle he thought he heard would be turned on him. Police never found an assault rifle. Fetterman insists that he didn’t single the man out because he was Black: Miyares was the only man on the street and he had his hood up; Fetterman says he couldn’t tell the man’s race before he pointed his gun.
Fetterman was anxious about discussing the details with me, not because he’s apologetic, as some might make themselves out to be over an incident like this, but because he very much is not.
As he accused Miyares of lying about what happened in 2013, Fetterman repeatedly referenced that Miyares had been convicted of kidnapping for ransom and other unrelated charges in 2019 and is now in state prison.
“Why invent a story about fireworks or the details of our encounter unless you were either involved in it directly or were covering for somebody that was involved in that?” he said. At one point, Fetterman seemed to equate Miyares with his political opponents. “The voters of Pennsylvania are going to have to make a choice between somebody with a 26-year track record of working to advance the interests of marginalized communities over the word of somebody who attempted to impersonate an Uber driver and abduct a woman at knifepoint and terrorized her, and is currently in state prison,” he told me.
The renewed focus on the incident reflects how politics is changing. The episode was never a secret: Local TV aired segments with both Fetterman and Miyares. But Fetterman is now running for office amid new national attention on society’s treatment of Black Americans. Last year, a Republican congressional candidate tweeted a video from one of those 2013 interviews, adding, “Nothing says deescalation & service to the community quite like pulling a shotgun on an unarmed black jogger who’d done nothing wrong because you heard a loud noise & made certain assumptions.” Donald Trump Jr. retweeted it with “YIKES” and three siren emoji."
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