Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, July 5, Alton Sterling was standing outside the Triple S Food Mart. Two police officers pulled into the parking lot to investigate an anonymous call alleging that a black man in a red shirt standing outside the store had threatened the caller with a gun. Minutes later, Sterling, who fit the caller’s description, was subdued by the officers and shot to death. From the time of the shooting until early that Tuesday evening, coverage of the incident was limited to local media, and there were no mentions of cell phone footage.

Chris LeDay

Atlanta resident and Baton Rouge native

The first I heard about Alton’s shooting was on my Channel 9 Twitter feed early Tuesday morning. I immediately screenshotted it and posted it on my Instagram. People started commenting on it, and an old classmate of mine told me that they knew a girl who had shot video of the shooting, and he knew where to find the video at. He sent it to me in my inbox. You see Alton with his hands in the air, and you see him confused. You see the cop tackle him and wrestle him down, and then you see the other cop put a knee in his chest and pull out the gun and shoot him. That night I put the video on my Instagram, my Twitter, my Facebook. Don Cheadle retweeted it. Shaun King from the Black Lives Matter movement reposted it.

Shaun King

Journalist and activist

I was at Ikea in Atlanta with my family, and I kept getting texts and social notifications telling me I had to watch this video out of Baton Rouge. It was still being shared in relatively small circles. So I watched it, and as I watched it, I thought: “How do I pretend in front of my wife and kids that I did not just see a grown man get shot?” His name wasn’t trending yet, but I felt that people needed to see it and understand it, so I posted on Twitter.

Julia Craven

Reporter for the Huffington Post, the first national outlet to cover the shooting

I was sitting in my living room, and my partner said to me, “Don’t watch this video, it’s terrible.” He explained there was a video floating around Twitter of a black man being shot by police, and I explained to him that, actually, I had to watch that video: It was my job. I could not find anything on the story outside of local papers, and I had a gut feeling that I needed to write about it. I quoted The Advocate’s fantastic reporting of the crime scene and the early protests, and I threw in Shaun King’s tweet about the discovery of the video. The whole thing was so … brutal that I knew it was going to pick up steam. I always find it interesting that we don’t pick things up until we have video.

Arthur “Silky Slim” Reed

Local activist

First time I watched that video on Tuesday, I thought, “Well, it’s a little grainy. Wish we had something better.”

Michael “A.V.” Mitchell

Local activist

That first night after Alton died, when the community realized what was going on after watching the video on social media, I went over to the Triple S. People were just standing outside, not knowing what to do.

Cleve Dunn Jr.

Local activist

People just showed up. There wasn’t even a call to action. People just showed up.

Gary Chambers

Local activist

On Tuesday night I was doing a Facebook Live interview with Abdullah, the owner over at the Triple S. I was asking him to tell me what happened, and that’s when he showed me his video. He hadn’t shown it publicly, and when I saw it, I was like, “Man, this second video gonna change everything.” Because it was so vivid. You see the blood pumping out of Alton’s chest.

Abdullah Muflahi

Owner of the Triple S

It had been a smooth night. Quiet. Around midnight, five minutes before the cops showed up, Alton was in here, and me and him were talking. He didn’t seem angry, didn’t seem mad. We were just laughing and joking around. We were good friends.

When I saw the cops pull up, I walked outside to see what’s going on. By the time I got outside, they were grabbing him, trying to throw him on top of a car. He was asking what he did wrong. He never went for his gun. He never put his hand in his pocket. He was asking them, “What did I do wrong? What’s going on? Why are you guys doing this?” I didn’t start recording on my phone till I seen them tackle him on the floor. I was up close, and I was like, “Maybe my video will help out somehow with his case when he goes to court.” I didn’t tell the police about the recording, because I knew they would confiscate it. I knew that the public needed to see what happened.

Ted James

Member of the Louisiana House of Representatives

The second video is what really tipped the scale. There had been demonstrations outside the Triple S all day and night, but they were pretty small. With the second video, the crowds started getting larger. More pastors were getting involved. More community organizers got involved. The anger just intensified. The video was just so rough: unarmed guy, tackled, tased, hands pinned down. I only watched it once. I couldn’t watch it a second time.

Jonny Dunnam

Spokesperson, Baton Rouge Police Department

When the cell phone videos came out, we knew the public perception was not going to be great for the police. Ever since Ferguson, you have to be aware that anytime you have officer-involved shootings—and unfortunately, if it’s a white officer in the shooting of an African American citizen—it’s going to make news, especially if there’s video.

Mike Edmonson

Head of the Louisiana State Police

Those police officers will have to explain their actions. Period. We saw what we saw. There’s much more to be seen out there. There’s the body cameras that fell off, but they were still recording sound.

Dunnam

In this case we have a lot of camera footage—from the citizen, the business, in-car cameras. So there will be several different angles to consider, not just the one you see in that video on social media. Let’s take the protests on Airline [the highway, across from the Baton Rouge Police Department, where the protests that began outside the Triple S would migrate later in the week]. I know a lot of the public were livestreaming the protests, but I think that they only got one side of the protests.

Loveis Jackson

Local teenager

I was driving by the protests on Airline, and I was Snapchatting it all. The people were protesting peacefully, holding their signs, and then at one point they started walking into the street to stop traffic. That’s when pretty much all hell broke loose. The police came rushing in. At first it was just regular police officers, and then you see people in riot gear with the shields, the masks, the bats, and everything. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is really happening in Baton Rouge.”

Edmonson

Airline Highway is a major artery, and it’s an emergency route from north Baton Rouge to south Baton Rouge. It’s not something where you just walk out in the middle of the street. And when you attempt to block it, you’re breaking the law. And so that lady on Airline Highway in her long dress, with the SWAT team going up to her—they didn’t knock her down or drag her away. They were going to get her out of the road. But what does the world see? Us advancing on them like we’re going to attack her. That picture just took a snapshot of the moment, and that’s what’s bad about social media. It’s only a snapshot.

Dunnam

We have an intelligence division that monitors social media, and their main goal is to find out where protests are going to be. I think because of the actions of our intelligence, we were able to kind of stay on top of that.

Edmonson

On Airline you saw a lot of good, and you saw a lot of bad. Think about this: A single mosquito gets your attention. There’s billions of them, but that one mosquito, you have to deal with it. We got a lot of compliments with how we handled ourselves during the protests. We didn’t beat anybody. We didn’t aggressively hurt anybody.

DeRay Mckesson

Activist and organizer with Black Lives Matter

My plan was not to get arrested [at the protests in Baton Rouge]. If you look at my timeline, I kept doing Vines because I couldn’t get Periscope to work. I kept trying to Periscope, though, and the last time I remember trying, I pushed the button, it worked, and then I got arrested. Without my video and others like it, I think people would not have known that the Baton Rouge police were wielding their power indiscriminately over protesters.

Chambers

We’re the first city that got the Justice Department in the community within 30 hours to take over an investigation. Man, if Dr. King had the technology that we have, he’d have been a badder man. We’d have had a black president in the ’80s.

Reed

The first time I heard the name Philando Castile, I was at the protests at the Triple S. People started showing the Facebook Live video to each other on their phones, and I think it heated up the protests more than when we initially started it. It was shocking, just as powerful as Alton, and I immediately thought two things: I was very grieved that an individual had lost his life, and then I became concerned that this was going to take attention away from Alton.

Chambers

I didn’t watch the whole Philando video, but I remember thinking, “This really just happened. Alton got killed yesterday, and then I’ve gotta watch blood ooze out of another man today.” It was like, “Damn, you gonna kill us all?”