Topher’s killer gets 25 to life after emotional sentencing hearing

A Coeur d’Alene judge sentenced Scott M. White to a minimum of 25 years behind bars for shooting to death Michael C. “Topher” Clark at the Tipsy Pine Tavern in Hayden more than a year ago.

The crowded courtroom let out a sigh Friday after First District Judge Cynthia K.C. Meyer followed a recommendation by prosecutors to mete out a lengthy prison term for White, who shot Clark five times in an icy parking lot after an altercation.

The more than 45 people at Friday’s hearing watched surveillance videos of the shooting that took place in the dark and showed Clark beating White after following him into the parking lot after a brief scuffle inside the Tipsy Pine.

On the video, White falls down, and Clark helps him up and continues to strike White with his fists. The small firearm White carried in a hidden belt holster fell onto the ground. White’s girlfriend intervenes in the fight by stepping between the men. That is when White picks up the gun and shoots Clark twice in the chest. While a mortally wounded Clark lays on the ground White approaches and shoots him three more times. Then White walks up to an almost lifeless Clark and puts the barrel of the small pistol to his head.

“We don’t know if he pulled the trigger again,” Arthur Verharen, chief deputy criminal prosecutor, told the court Friday. “But the last move Topher made when he was alive was to brush the barrel away from his temple.”

The gun was empty.

White had discharged all the rounds in the five-shot handgun that Verharen called, “… Not fun to shoot … its only purpose is to kill someone.”

White, who appeared meek, almost shrunken, balding and blanched Friday as he stood between his attorneys, wept as he told the court he was sorry for the actions he referred to as an “overreaction.”

He should not have been drinking that night, he should not have gotten drunk, he should not have taken a firearm into a tavern, he told the court.

“I know I can never repay … all the broken hearts I have caused,” White said.

Defense attorney John Redal said he was the one who received the surveillance videos from prosecutors and brought them to jail for White to view after White’s arrest.

“He couldn’t believe what he had done, what he watched, what he saw himself do,” Redal said.

Defense attorney Doug Phelps told the court that the three versions of the surveillance footage presented in court, the close ups, slow motion and enhanced footage, did not represent how quickly the deadly incident happened.

“It was quick, it was fast action … in an icy parking lot,” Phelps said. “These two people collided in a tragic manner.”

While viewing the nighttime footage, the audience gasped as fire from the pistol’s muzzle lit up the parking lot, once, twice. Smoke could be seen rising into the streetlights and when the footage showed White shooting three more times, audience members began to sob.

It was the three final shots that were the most egregious, Verharen said. But the two earlier shots that struck Clark in the chest were equally unwarranted.

“The fight was over,” Verharen said.

Clark’s mother, Christine Hewson, cried as she gave her statement to the court.

“Murder is the lowest of mankind’s sin,” Hewson said. “We’re all living with the rage and the sickness that murder brings … the sickness of grief … I hadn’t known it, but I know it now.”

Robert Clark, Topher’s oldest brother, said for a year he has watched his mother cry and his father withdraw into anger and helplessness.

“On this day, we both lose a family member,” Clark said. “I can only hope we can all leave this courtroom with lighter hearts, knowing justice was served.”

Meyer said she understood the rationalization offered by the defense. White was provoked, he was pummeled and beaten by Clark.

White’s blood alcohol level hours after the shooting was almost three times the legal limit to drive, the judge said. His actions were prompted by the irrationality intoxication induces.

But that could not be an excuse, Meyer said.

The defendant, she said, “was raised well,” and was known to be kind, generous and helpful.

She read more than a dozen letters from his friends, relatives and the people he had helped.

“This was shocking to them who knew him best,” Meyer said.

But she pointed out White’s many misdemeanors, his DUIs, his belligerence and disregard for authority when he drinks. It may have resulted in White’s being drubbed in a tavern parking lot, Meyer said.

“That is when a responsible person calls law enforcement,” she said. “The drunk person takes the law into his own hands.”

White was originally charged with first-degree murder but pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in December.

Clark was a small-town celebrity made famous for his part in a lucrative marijuana smuggling enterprise that was the focus of a Rolling Stone article, and the 2014 “Kid Cannabis” film. The movie, a comedy-drama, was based on the true story of a group of area teens — including Clark — who built a multi-million-dollar marijuana trafficking enterprise by smuggling pot through the woods across the Canada and U.S. border.