What to Know
Frances Zaayer was a longtime friend of Shawna Scott’s family. Shawna Scott met her as a teenager, and Zaayer even lived with Shawna Scott’s grandmother for a while as her own family situation became rocky. She moved away from Mount Sterling, Kentucky, got married, and eventually returned to her hometown.
When the newly divorced Zaayer needed a place to stay, Shawna Scott welcomed her into her family as if no time had passed. But not long after their reunion, things soured and eventually took a deadly turn. The new Netflix docuseries Worst Neighbor Ever explores the devastating breakdown of the relationship.
Zaayer moved in with Shawna Scott and her husband.
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After moving back to Mount Sterling, Zaayer decided to purchase the property across the street from Shawna and David Scott. In order to move in, she’d have to knock down the existing mobile home and put up a new one. The Scotts offered to let Zaayer move in with them during construction.
“I could get along with pretty much anybody, and I thought I’m gonna help her,” Shawna Scott said in Worst Neighbor Ever. “My main goal was to just be there and treat her like family, and that’s what I intended on doing.”
It seemed like an ideal situation for the family friends.
“We all loved her,” Shawna Scott’s aunt Wanda Collingsworth shared in the documentary. “She was funny. She was fun to be with. I don’t know what happened to her.”
Things quickly began to shift.
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It didn’t take long for the family to realize that Zaayer wasn’t the person everyone remembered. According to his wife, David Scott was a great judge of character, and he didn’t like Zaayer. David Scott called her “loud-mouthed” and an “attention-seeker.”
Shawna Scott explained that while living in the family’s mobile home, Zaayer began demanding the Scotts do things her way. She didn’t want to be awoken early by cleaning and showing young kids videos of herself at protests against Islam.
David Scott was Black, and Zaayer allegedly began making racist remarks that made the family uncomfortable. Eventually, she allegedly reprimanded Shawna Scott’s grandson, which was the last straw, and the Scotts kicked her out.
Zaayer moved across the street and evidently did her best to make life miserable.
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In the documentary, Shawna Scott alleged Zaayer did everything in her power to make Shawna Scott and David Scott unhappy. At one point, the two women got into a physical altercation that led to Shawna’s arrest.
Zaayer apparently wanted nothing more than to see her neighbor behind bars, but prosecutors offered a plea deal that kept Shawna Scott out of jail. Zaayer called police multiple times and at one point said during a 911 call, “If they came down here and murdered me, and you never saw it, did it never happen? I might lose my life over this.”
In the end, Zaayer was the killer. She fatally shot David Scott on May 26, 2018, and seriously injured Shawna Scott with a gunshot wound to the face. “I suffered the loss of my sight in my left eye, the loss of hearing in my left ear, scars on my face, just a lot of surgeries and a lot of healing,” Shawna Scott shared in Worst Neighbor Ever.
A court sentenced Zaayer to 35 years in prison.
