US stocks retreated from a record high, ending a multi-day rally that had been spurred along this week by signs of easing inflation.

A late-session dip resulted in the benchmark S&P 500 closing 0.2 per cent lower on Thursday. Wall Street’s benchmark had been as much as 0.3 per cent higher in early trading to set a record intraday high.

Consumer staples was the S&P 500’s best-performing sector, as Walmart shares leapt 7 per cent to a record high, while basic materials was the index’s worst-performing group.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 0.3 per cent, ending a three-session winning streak. The small-cap focused Russell 2000 declined 0.6 per cent.

Traders sold Treasuries, pushing the yield on the two-year note up 0.06 percentage points to 4.80 per cent. The yield on the 10-year note rose 0.02 percentage points to 4.38 per cent.

A lawyer for the family of Roger Fortson insisted Thursday that the body camera video from the Florida sheriff’s deputy who killed the Black Air Force senior airman and police radio audio support their assertion that the deputy went to the wrong apartment while responding to a domestic disturbance call that day.

At a news conference, civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump played audio from a police radio in which a dispatcher says that a “fourth party” gave them information about the location of the disturbance.

“Uh, don’t have, uh, any further other than a male and female,” the dispatcher tells officers. “It’s all fourth-party information from the front desk at the leasing office.”

The news conference was held at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, and was attended by Fortson’s parents, siblings and other family.

Crump said the radio audio had been condensed to remove communications that were not relevant to the incident at the apartment complex where Fortson was shot six times. NBC News has not listened to an unedited version of the audio.

The Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which is handling the criminal investigation into the shooting, did not immediately return requests for comment about the family’s assertion that the deputy went to the wrong door. The sheriff’s office has not released an incident report or any 911 records. Sheriff Eric Aden has previously said the deputy had not entered the wrong apartment.

Fortson, 23, was shot May 3 in the doorway of his apartment in Fort Walton Beach by a deputy from the sheriff’s office who was responding to an apparent domestic dispute. Fortson’s family and their attorneys have insisted the deputy went to the wrong apartment because Fortson was home alone and on a FaceTime call with his girlfriend at the time of the incident. Crump said Thursday that the two were not raising their voices and had been making plans to see each other that weekend. Crump and Fortson’s family contend his killing was unjustified.

Crump showed two clips from the body camera video of the deputy being led around the apartment complex by a woman. At one point, the deputy asks her, “Which door?” She tells him, “I’m not sure.” The woman also tells the deputy that she heard a disturbance that included a slap two weeks ago and says, “I wasn’t sure where it came from.”

The woman later tells the deputy that he should go to apartment 1401, footage shows. It is unclear who the woman is, but Crump said Thursday that he believes she works in the leasing office of the complex.

When the deputy arrives at the apartment, he first knocks without identifying himself. He then knocks two more times, identifies himself as a member of the sheriff’s office and steps away from the door.

The video shows Fortson answer the door of his apartment with a gun in his right hand that is pointed downward and being shot by the deputy within seconds. After shooting, the deputy shouted for Fortson to drop the gun. Fortson legally owned the firearm, Crump said.

Crump said multiple times Thursday that he believed the deputy had “used excessive force” and had “executed” Fortson.

“As his mother said, they cannot stain his reputation,” Crump said. “But she feels, as long as they continue to say that they went to the right apartment, they’re staining his reputation. Because Roger did not have any domestic disturbance. Roger had no criminal history.”

Even by the standards of central Europe’s polarised politics, Slovak politicians stand out for their vitriolic discourse.

Barely minutes after Prime Minister Robert Fico was shot and left gravely injured on Wednesday, some of his allies accused the opposition and the media of having blood on their hands and threatened a clampdown.

L’uboš Blaha, deputy speaker of parliament and a senior member of Fico’s Smer party, told opposition MPs: “This is your work.”

“I want to express my deep disgust at what you have been doing here for the last few years. You, the liberal media, the political opposition, what kind of hatred did you spread towards Robert Fico? You built gallows for him.”

The shooting, which the government said was carried out by a “lone wolf” attacker with political motives, has left the country reeling and has raised questions about the threat that the spiral of toxicity poses to democracy just weeks before European parliamentary elections. 

“This tragic event should be a lesson to all of us,” Věra Jourová, European Commission vice-president, told the Financial Times. “All over Europe, we can see increased polarisation and hate . . . We have to understand that verbal violence can lead to physical violence.”

Many Slovaks see the assassination attempt as the culmination of months of verbal attacks, disinformation campaigns and even fist fights between the liberal opposition and allies of Fico, who returned to power in October.

Fico’s condition was described as serious but stable on Thursday after five hours of surgery on his bullet wounds. 

In a rare sign of unity, Slovakia’s outgoing liberal president, Zuzana Čaputová, joined her successor and Fico ally, Peter Pellegrini, to make a joint address on Thursday. “We are in complete agreement in condemning any violence,” said Čaputová. “Yesterday’s attack on Prime Minister Robert Fico is first and foremost a great human tragedy, but also an attack on democracy.”

Fico’s government also pledged to ease its campaign activities for the EU elections if other parties followed suit. 

In fact the shooting could allow Fico’s ruling coalition to reap significant benefits, both by gleaning a “clear sympathy vote” in June and by providing an opening to accelerate its clampdown on opposition media, said Misha Glenny, rector of the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences.

“There are risk-averse members of the Fico coalition who will try to moderate the course, but the coalition also needs to keep those who want to escalate things in order to survive” and maintain Fico’s parliamentary majority, said Juraj Medzihorsky, a Slovak assistant professor of social data science at Durham University.

One particular concern is the response of the ultranationalist SNS party that forms part of Fico’s three-way coalition. Its chair, Andrej Danko, warned that “a political war is beginning at this stage”.

Danko also promised “changes to the media” beyond Fico’s planned overhaul of the public broadcaster RTVS, which critics say threatens its editorial independence. Fico’s coalition also recently advanced legislation in parliament that could deprive non-government organisations of foreign funding. 

At the same time, Belgium’s prime minister Alexander de Croo told the FT there was a risk that vitriolic attacks and increased danger would deter people from entering politics. “There’s a French saying that when people who feel disgusted go away, you have only disgusting people stay.” 

In Bratislava, residents said they were stunned by Fico’s shooting, although many attributed it to the sharp degradation of political standards. 

“Politicians have been pouring a lot of oil on the fire here, so I think it was only a matter of time for something like that to happen. But that doesn’t mean that it was easy to imagine this could actually happen to our prime minister,” said Michal Venglar, a 33-year-old teacher.

Fico’s shooting has revived memories of another traumatic event in the Slovak psyche: the assassination of a 27-year-old investigative journalist and his fiancée in 2018. The reporter, Ján Kuciak, had been probing alleged collusion between government officials and organised crime. The furore over the killings forced Fico to resign as prime minister.

“It reminds me of the horror after the murder of Ján Kuciak and Martina Kušnírová, when Slovakia received negative news all over the world, and today it is like that again,” Ivan Štefanec, an opposition member of the European parliament, wrote on Slovak news site SME.

Grigorij Mesežnikov, a political scientist and president of the Institute of Public Affairs think-tank, said Slovakia’s “very confrontational” politics could be attributed to an “incomplete democratic transformation” after the fall of communism and the persistence of “problematic value orientations” such as xenophobia and homophobia.

Like others, Mesežnikov suggested the ruling coalition could opt for more radicalisation. Conversely, Fico could use his near-death experience as a turning point and change his aggressive political approach, said Mesežnikov — but he was “sceptical” about whether that would happen.

Last year Fico built his stunning comeback to office partly on stoking social tensions and accusing incumbent politicians of mismanagement and weakness. The election campaign featured a fist fight between Fico’s current defence minister and a former prime minister. 

Following Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Fico lambasted the then-government of Slovakia for allegedly violating national sovereignty by sending fighter jets to Kyiv at the request of Nato without parliamentary approval.

Some of Fico’s most virulent attacks were aimed at Čaputová — the popular liberal president has said that threats against her family were among the reasons that she did not seek re-election in April. Instead Fico’s coalition partner Pellegrini was elected after running a campaign accusing his pro-EU rival of wanting to deploy Slovak troops in Ukraine. 

“I would not want to put probabilities,” said Durham University’s Medzihorsky, “but the risk that things get worse is quite serious.”

Additional reporting by Alice Hancock in Brussels