CHARLOTTE — A man was shot and critically injured during a second violent night of protests here, after two sharply divergent accounts emerged of the death of a black man at the hands of police.

A march of a few hundred people turned chaotic after protesters attempted to follow police in riot gear into the lobby of an uptown hotel. Officers used tear gas, and then a reporter heard one shot and saw a man lying in the street near the hotel entrance.

Medics said he taken to a local hospital with injuries they said were “life-threatening.”

Marchers also used outdoor seating to break the windows of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which then barricaded its doors.

In the aftermath of the afternoon death of Keith Lamont Scott on Tuesday, anger in the streets turned to looting and arson, and North Carolina’s largest city joined the list of communities across the country that have erupted amid a growing debate on racial bias in policing.

At a news conference Wednesday, Charlotte police insisted that Scott had a gun and was posing an “imminent deadly threat” when officers shot him outside an apartment complex near the campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Scott’s family, however, said he was unarmed when he was killed and was instead reading a book in his car while waiting to pick up his child from school — a detail that quickly went viral on social media and was seized upon by protesters.