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by IanEye » Sun Aug 31, 2014 5:26 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Sep 08, 2014 8:51 am
Workers who were witnesses provide new perspective on Michael Brown shooting
Among the claims that ignited the fury over the fatal shooting of Michael Brown were that Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson chased the unarmed teen on foot, shot at him as he ran away, then fired a barrage of fatal shots after Brown had turned around with his hands up.
Almost all of the witnesses who shared these accounts with media either knew Brown; lived at or near the Canfield Green apartments, where the shooting occurred; or were visiting friends or relatives there.
But there were two outsiders who happened to be working outside at the apartment complex on Aug. 9 — two men from a company in Jefferson County — who heard a single gunshot, looked up from their work and witnessed the shooting.
Both have given their statements to the St. Louis County police and the FBI. One of the men agreed to share his account with a Post-Dispatch reporter on the condition that his name and employer not be used.
The worker, who has not previously spoken with reporters, said he did not see what happened at the officer’s car — where Wilson and Brown engaged in an initial struggle and a shot was fired from Wilson’s gun.
His account largely matches those who reported that Wilson chased Brown on foot away from the car after the initial gunshot and fired at least one more shot in the direction of Brown as he was fleeing; that Brown stopped, turned around and put his hands up; and that the officer killed Brown in a barrage of gunfire.
But his account does little to clarify perhaps the most critical moment of the confrontation, on which members of the grand jury in St. Louis County may focus to determine whether the officer was justified in using lethal force: whether Brown moved toward Wilson just before the fatal shots, and if he did, how aggressively.
At least one witness has said Brown was not moving. Others didn’t mention him moving, while still others have said he was heading toward Wilson.
There is no way to determine how many witnesses have spoken to law enforcement without making public statements. The worker acknowledged that his account could be valuable to the case because he did not know either Brown or Wilson and had no ties to Ferguson.
The worker said he saw Brown on Aug. 9 about 11 a.m. as Brown was walking west on Canfield Drive, toward West Florissant Avenue.
He said Brown struck up a rambling, half-hour conversation with his co-worker.
The co-worker could not be reached for comment through his employer. He previously told KTVI (Channel 2) that he had uttered a profanity in frustration after hitting a tree root while digging. Brown heard him and stopped to talk.
Brown “told me he was feeling some bad vibes,” the co-worker told KTVI in a video that aired Aug. 12. “That the Lord Jesus Christ would help me through that as long as I didn’t get all angry at what I was doing.”
The worker interviewed by the Post-Dispatch said he paid attention to little of the conversation. He said he heard Brown tell his co-worker that he had a picture of Jesus on his wall; and the co-worker joked that the devil had a picture of him on the wall.
The co-worker told KTVI that Brown promised to come back and resume their conversation; Brown walked away, and the workers returned to their job.
About a half-hour later, the worker heard a gunshot. Then he saw Brown running away from a police car. Wilson trailed about 10 to 15 feet behind, gun in hand. About 90 feet away from the car, the worker said, Wilson fired another shot at Brown, whose back was turned.
The worker said Brown stumbled and then stopped, put his hands up, turned around and said, “OK, OK, OK, OK, OK.” He said he told investigators from the St. Louis County police and the FBI that because of the stumble, it seemed to him that Brown had been wounded.
A private autopsy showed that all but one of his gunshot wounds came while Brown was facing Wilson. Shawn L. Parcells, who participated in the autopsy, said one of the wounds to the arm could have occurred when Brown was facing away from Wilson. “It’s inconclusive,” he said. St. Louis County and federal autopsy results have not been released.
Wilson, gun drawn, also stopped about 10 feet in front of Brown, the worker said.
Then Brown moved, the worker said. “He’s kind of walking back toward the cop.” He said Brown’s hands were still up.
Wilson began backing up as he fired, the worker said.
After the third shot, Brown’s hands started going down, and he moved about 25 feet toward Wilson, who kept backing away and firing. The worker said he could not tell from where he watched — about 50 feet away — if Brown’s motion toward Wilson after the shots was “a stumble to the ground” or “OK, I’m going to get you, you’re already shooting me.”
Among people who have spoken to the media, there hasn’t been a clear consensus on what happened after Brown turned around.
Dorian Johnson — a friend of Brown’s who said he was walking with him when Wilson approached them on Canfield and told them to get off the street — told CNN that Brown was “beginning to tell the officer he was unarmed and to tell him to stop shooting.” Johnson, 22, told KTVI Brown was starting to get down when he was shot.
Johnson also told MSNBC that Wilson began shooting before Brown “could get his last words out.”
Another witness who lives nearby, Michael T. Brady, 32, told CNN that Brown turned with his hands under his stomach. He also said Brown took one or two steps toward Wilson as he was going down when Wilson fired three or four more times.
Piaget Crenshaw, who lives in the Canfield apartments, and Tiffany Mitchell, her boss, were in different places in the complex. Crenshaw told CNN that Brown didn’t move toward Wilson. In several statements to reporters, neither has mentioned Brown moving toward Wilson.
The New York Times quoted James McKnight as saying Brown stumbled toward Wilson, who was 6 to 7 feet away.
Phillip Walker, 40, another Canfield Green resident, told the Post-Dispatch on Tuesday that Brown was walking at a steady pace toward Wilson, with his hands up. “Not quickly,” Walker said. “He did not rush the officer.” Walker, who is distantly related to a Post-Dispatch reporter not involved in this report, said the last shot, into the top of Brown’s head, was from about 4 feet away.
“It wasn’t justified because he didn’t pose no threat to the officer. I don’t understand why he didn’t Tase him if he deemed him to be hostile. He didn’t have no weapon on him. I was confused on why he was shooting his rounds off like that into this individual,” Walker said.
The co-worker in the KTVI interview said he “starting hearing pops and when I look over … I seen somebody staggering and running. And when he finally caught himself he threw his hands up and started screaming, ‘OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK.’”
He said the officer “didn’t say, ‘Get on the ground.’ He didn’t say anything. At first his gun was down and then he … got about 8 to 10 feet away from him … I heard six, seven shots … it seemed like seven. Then he put his gun down. That’s when Michael stumbled forward. I’d say about 25 feet or so and then fell right on his face.”
No witness has ever publicly claimed that Brown charged at Wilson. The worker interviewed by the Post-Dispatch disputed claims by Wilson’s defenders that Brown was running full speed at the officer.
“I don’t know if he was going after him or if he was falling down to die,” he said. “It wasn’t a bull rush.”
David Hunn and Stephen Deere of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
by Grizzly » Tue Sep 09, 2014 9:21 pm
by Luther Blissett » Thu Sep 25, 2014 1:28 pm
HAPPENING NOW (9.24.14): The situation in Ferguson is escalating quickly. Protests continue, following this morning’s burning of a Mike Brown memorial, and another frustrating Ferguson City Council meeting.Looks like the same “antagonize over de-escalate” tactics are back online. Prayers to all those out in the street of Ferguson right now fighting for their right to exist. #staywoke #farfromover (PT I, PT II, PT III)
Bringing back the dogs, choppers, charging the crowd, attempting to bottleneck protesters into an area, AND live shots possible fired into the crowd… what the ever-living fuck is Ferguson PD trying to do?! We’re a month and a half into this saga, and they still don’t know how to de-escalate a situation. Pray y’all. That might be all we got right now.
by elfismiles » Thu Sep 25, 2014 1:42 pm
Luther Blissett » 25 Sep 2014 17:28 wrote:Still going on:HAPPENING NOW (9.24.14): The situation in Ferguson is escalating quickly. Protests continue, following this morning’s burning of a Mike Brown memorial, and another frustrating Ferguson City Council meeting.Looks like the same “antagonize over de-escalate” tactics are back online. Prayers to all those out in the street of Ferguson right now fighting for their right to exist. #staywoke #farfromover (PT I, PT II, PT III)Bringing back the dogs, choppers, charging the crowd, attempting to bottleneck protesters into an area, AND live shots possible fired into the crowd… what the ever-living fuck is Ferguson PD trying to do?! We’re a month and a half into this saga, and they still don’t know how to de-escalate a situation. Pray y’all. That might be all we got right now.
http://socialjusticekoolaid.tumblr.com/ ... n-ferguson
by seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 03, 2014 7:41 am
WEEKEND EDITION OCTOBER 3-5, 2014
The Seeds of Bias in the Michael Brown Case
Who Killed Prosecutor Robert McCullough’s Father?
by PETER JAMES HUDSON
More than 100,000 people have signed a petition demanding St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch recuse himself from the grand jury investigating the killing of Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson. McCulloch’s deep loyalties to the St. Louis Police Department, as evidenced by his prosecution of two racially charged, high-profile cases, have prompted critical doubts about his ability to fairly adjudicate evidence vindicating Brown, and implicating Wilson. His prosecution of a black man charged with murdering a St. Louis County police officer in 1991 raised serious questions about his motives, and in McCulloch’s 2001 investigation of the killing of two unarmed black men (whom McCulloch referred to as “bums”) by two white undercover police officers, questions arose, this time concerning McCulloch’s handling of witness testimony. The officers were never indicted.
McCulloch’s fealty to the police is clear. He has stated that he would have joined the force (after a stint in the military) had he not lost a leg to cancer as a teenager. “I couldn’t become a policeman,” he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “so being county prosecutor is the next best thing.” If he had become a cop, he would have followed a well-worn family path. His brother Joseph was a sergeant in St. Louis’s Ninth District. For two decades his mother, Anne, was employed as a clerk in the homicide division. His father, Paul, joined the force in 1949 before resigning to serve with the US Marines in Korea. Paul McCulloch returned to the SLPD in 1951 and in 1955 became an original member of the department’s Canine Corps. He became a minor celebrity because of the work of Duke, described by the Chicago Defender as his “reefer-sniffing dog.”
Fifty years before Michael Brown was shot to death on the streets of Ferguson, McCulloch’s father died in the line of duty. The father’s death casts additional doubt on the son’s ability to lead the grand jury investigation into Brown’s killing, while at the same time shedding a garish light on the history of racism, policing, and the law in St. Louis.
Paul McCulloch was killed the evening of July 2, 1964, during a gun battle in St. Louis’s infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. His alleged killer, Eddie Steve Glenn, was a black man who had reportedly abducted a white woman. McCulloch was 12 years old at the time of his father’s death. He still gets emotional when the incident is brought up, though he denies that the killing has influenced his vision as a prosecutor. “My father was killed many, many years ago, and it’s certainly not something you forget, but it’s certainly not something that clouds my judgment in looking at a case,” McCulloch told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1991. “It certainly makes you more aware of the severity of it.”
Yet the memory of the killing clearly lives on. McCulloch evoked his father’s death in his campaign ads during his run for D.A. in 1991, and in the wake of the protests in Ferguson newspapers including The New York Times have recycled a redemption narrative of the bereaved son of an officer felled in the line of duty emerging as a messianic defender of justice. The killing of McCulloch’s father has also become part of the institutional lore of the St. Louis Police Department. Online bulletin boards and memorial pages contain posts written by police officers and their relatives offering condolences to the McCulloch family and providing testimony to Paul McCulloch’s character. McCulloch’s father is featured in the compilation In the Line of Duty: St. Louis Police Officers Who Made the Ultimate Sacrifice, written by St. Louis police librarian Barbara Miksicek. Published via a $7,500 donation from the St. Louis Police Foundation, the second edition of In the Line of Duty came out this past March. In July of this year, the Gendarme, the monthly newsletter of the St. Louis Fraternal Order of Police, published a story marking the 50-year anniversary of McCulloch’s death.
There is, however, a problem with this story of murder and memorialization. The problem is this: Eddie Glenn may not have murdered Robert McCulloch’s father.
While Glenn was charged and convicted of first-degree murder by the Missouri courts, a close reading of the state’s justifications for his conviction and sentence suggests two alternative possibilities. One, Glenn might have been guilty of second-degree murder or manslaughter, but should have been acquitted anyway due to the circumstantial and doubtful nature of the evidence against him. Two, McCulloch might have been killed by either his own gun or from gunfire from a fellow officer.
In either scenario, what is abundantly clear is that Glenn was railroaded to a murder conviction and a death sentence. During his arrest and trial there were egregious violations of his civil and constitutional rights by the St. Louis Police Department and the Missouri courts. There were questions concerning the circumstances under which Glenn’s confession was obtained. There were doubts surrounding the bias of the presiding judge and concerns with his prejudicial interventions into the defense’s cross-examination of police witnesses. Forensic evidence in the case was ambiguous. The jury — made up of 12 white men — was predisposed to find him guilty. And perhaps most importantly, there were no witnesses to the alleged crime.
Furthermore, as narrated by the St. Louis Police Department and the State of Missouri, the events leading to the killing of Paul McCulloch are so laden with anti-black stereotypes and so structured by white fears of African-American criminality that the entire incident appears almost as a caricature, an opéra bouffe, of 1960s white Southern justice — if only its denouement were not so tragic, and if only it did not undermine the possibilities of justice for Michael Brown.
*
What happened that day in St. Louis? According to the State of Missouri, on July 2, 1964, Eddie Steve Glenn, “a Negro,” had spent the afternoon drinking whiskey and had ingested two barbiturate “goofballs.” By the early evening, drunk and high and needing 16 dollars for a heroin fix, he decided to rob Marilyn Morris. Morris, a white woman, had double-parked her ’51 Chevrolet Impala in front of her father’s Food Fair Super Market on the 800 block of North Leffingwell. Glenn got into the passenger seat, brandished a knife, and told Morris to drive. Glenn took four dollars and some change from Morris’s purse, pulled the diamond ring from her finger, and the two of them drove for the next hour, stopping only once to get a dollar’s worth of gas.
Morris honked her horn repeatedly in an attempt to draw attention to her abduction, but no one came to her aid until St. Louis police officer Robert Steele, responding to a report on the police radio, spotted the Impala. Steele pulled it over on North 20th Street by DeSoto Park and approached the car from the driver’s side. He asked Morris her name. Morris told him, jumped from the car, and ran from the scene. Steele drew his .38 caliber Smith & Wesson and ordered Glenn out of the car. As Glenn got out, he lunged at Steele, grabbing for his gun. During the ensuing struggle, a single shot was fired. Glenn managed to wrestle away Steele’s weapon. Steele, covered in blood and thinking he had been shot — though, in fact, the bullet had hit Glenn — managed to radio for backup. Glenn then fired two shots at Steele, both shots missing their target, before sprinting across the baseball diamonds of DeSoto Park toward the Pruitt-Igoe housing development. He tried unsuccessfully to steal a ’59 Buick before entering the passageway between the project’s towers.
A minute after hearing Steele’s call, two more police officers, Ralph Atkins and Ronald Pott, arrived. Atkins took Steele to the hospital. Pott chased Glenn into Pruitt-Igoe. Paul McCulloch, just beginning his shift, joined Pott in pursuit. They tried to encircle Glenn, attempting to corner him between the project towers. But Pott suddenly found himself face to face with Glenn. Both men fired. Pott was shot in his left arm and fell to the ground; Glenn was wounded in the abdomen but managed to stay standing. By this time, more officers had arrived on the scene: James Miller, a member of the housing project’s police force, along with St. Louis police officers Dan Kirner and Arthur J. Mueller. As residents of Pruitt-Igoe scrambled for cover, a gunfight erupted. Glenn was shot several times before Mueller flattened him with a riot gun whose cartridges were packed with double-ought buckshot, metal balls a quarter-inch in diameter.
Glenn was in critical condition and remained so for the next two days. He suffered from multiple gunshot wounds. Bullets had punctured his colon and bladder. There were pellets in one of his fingers, and a bullet was lodged in his left foot. He was taken to St. Louis’s City Hospital #1, where he underwent surgery close to midnight.
McCulloch was found lying on the Pruitt-Igoe walkways, bleeding from a single gunshot wound to his head. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
*
On July 16, 1964, the State of Missouri indicted Glenn for McCulloch’s murder. Two days later, the court appointed David M. Grant as Glenn’s attorney. Grant, a prominent St. Louis civil rights attorney, had studied at Howard University and was involved in one of the earliest desegregation campaigns in St. Louis. He was the head of the St. Louis chapter of the National Association for Colored People and was a local Democratic powerbroker. Grant met Glenn for the first time during his arraignment; Glenn was pushed into the courtroom, chained to his wheelchair, arms in casts, tubes draining his stomach. Glenn initially pleaded not guilty before changing his plea to not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect. When the case went to trial the following summer, Grant pressed for an acquittal.
Grant’s arguments were based on the conjectural quality of the evidence, the dubious and at times contradictory nature of testimony from prosecution witnesses, and the admissibility — and veracity — of Glenn’s confessions to the police. He pointed out to the jury that even though more than a thousand people lived in Pruitt-Igoe, and even though the incident occurred before dusk, there were no witnesses to McCulloch’s death. The events immediately surrounding McCulloch’s shooting were based largely on ambiguous and circumstantial evidence. The prosecution based its case on the testimony of Pruitt-Igoe resident Esaline King and patrolman Mueller, the officer who had shot Glenn with the riot gun. King claimed that she saw Glenn walking, heard the sound of a gunshot, and then turned around only to see McCulloch fall. While she did not see Glenn shoot McCulloch, she also could not consistently identify Glenn in court. Like King, Mueller did not see Glenn shoot McCulloch, but he stated that he found Glenn near the body of McCulloch, “acting like he was getting out of a scuffle with someone.” While the court conceded, “no one actually saw defendant point his gun at Officer McCulloch and shoot,” it saw both statements, from King and Mueller, as powerful implications of Glenn’s direct involvement in the killing.
The court also admitted that the forensic evidence was ambiguous: McCulloch could have been shot by Glenn, by his own gun, or by another officer. While Grant tried to draw this out through his cross-examination of ballistic experts, his efforts did not apparently convince the jury.
Glenn did not testify during the trial, but his confessions, allegedly made in the hospital in the hours and days following McCulloch’s killing, became an important part of the case against him. He was first interviewed as he lay on a gurney outside the operating room before he entered surgery. Though he was described as “incoherent” and complained that “his stomach was hurting and burning,” he allegedly told a circuit district attorney that he thought he was going to die and confessed to killing McCulloch. The next morning, though still in critical condition, additional St. Louis police officers interviewed him and Marilyn Morris was brought to the hospital to identify him. A few days later, days before a second surgery to remove the pellets from his hand, detectives interviewed him again.
Throughout the interviews, Glenn was in considerable pain. He was physically exhausted from the shooting, the surgery, and the sedation. He did not have a lawyer present during any of the interviews, and it was unclear whether or not his confessions were coerced. Under 24-hour police guard during his stay in the hospital, only the police and representatives of the district attorney’s office were in the room during the interviews. Visitation rights were only granted to his mother, and she was only permitted to come for 15 minutes at a time.
While some of Glenn’s confessions were not allowed in court, those that were were given to St. Louis police officers without other witnesses present. Glenn’s voice, such that it was, emerges through the courtroom testimony of the police. The following quotation, for instance, comes from Detective Keady’s courtroom testimony recounting his hospital-bed interview with Glenn days after the events in question:
I then asked [Glenn], “Can you recall just what happened night before last in regard to Marilyn Morris and the shooting of police officers?” And he said “I remember seeing the white girl parked in the car in the 800 block of North Leffingwell.” He said, “I got in on the right side and showed her my knife and told her to drive on.” He continued, he said, “I took four dollars from her purse, a dollar of which we bought gas with and I took — she gave me the ring from her finger.” I said, “Eddie, do you remember shooting the police officers?” And he said, “Yes, I remember the first police officer that pulled the car over to the curb, … I remember shooting him.” I said, “Well, you didn’t shoot that police officer, you shot at him, … you didn’t hit him; that was Robert Steele.” I said “Do you remember the other two police officers?” He said, “yes.” I said, “Do you remember shooting them?” He said “Yes. … I remember shooting the policeman who shot me in the side.” I said, “That would be Ronald Pott. Do you remember shooting Paul McCulloch, the other police officer?” He said, “I remember shooting a police officer and seeing him fall to the ground.” I said “Who did you shoot first, the police officer who shot you, who would be Pott, or McCulloch?” He said, “I don’t remember because I had been drinking a lot of liquor and I had taken those two goofballs.”
If the statements did in fact come from Glenn, it is surprising he would so willingly implicate himself without a measure of threat somewhat stronger than Keady’s obvious coaxing and prodding. However, when Grant tried to challenge the confessions based on both their constitutional validity and the fact that they were made (if they were made at all) under duress, the presiding judge dismissed his arguments and the court upheld the confessions as admissible and voluntary. When Grant attempted to show the contradictions in police testimony concerning the events on the evening of July 2, 1964, the judge shut down his inquiries. When Grant attempted to demonstrate that the police officers could have worked together to present a unified story before the trial, his questions were squelched and his theory squashed.
It is impossible to know where Grant’s questions may have led if he had been permitted to ask them. But it is entirely plausible that the St. Louis Police Department pinned McCulloch’s killing on Glenn to cover up and protect one of their own brothers. Additionally, a reading of both the trial transcript and the State of Missouri’s interpretation of the case also suggests that all is not as it appears in the circumstances leading to McCulloch’s killing. While Glenn admitted to entering Morris’s car, it seems implausible that a white woman could drive a black man around 1964 St. Louis for an hour, all the while honking the car horn, and stopping for gas, without attracting attention or arousing suspicion. It is bizarre that they could have driven an hour from North Leffingwell while ending up at DeSoto Park, less than five minutes away. It is hard to understand how Steele could not know that he had not been shot and could be thrown into a faint-like daze through his non-injuries. It is strange that a drink- and drug-addled man could wrestle a gun from a sober police officer before engaging in a running gun-battle with four or five police officers, killing a police officer with a clean shot with his last bullet. It is implausible that a black man would so easily confess to killing a white cop without a measure of strong-arming and threats. It is equally unlikely that the St. Louis police did not in some way script their story to ensure a conviction.
None of this mattered. On November 27, 1965, an all-white, all-male jury deliberated for an hour and 15 minutes before finding Glenn guilty of murder and recommending a sentence of death. Glenn was sentenced to die in Missouri’s gas chamber early in the next year.
His conviction was easy to come by. As Grant argued in court, in the weeks leading up to the trial, local newspapers had published editorials and articles sensationalizing violence against St. Louis police officers. They demanded tough, remorseless sentencing of those convicted of assaults on law enforcement. Incidents at Pruitt-Igoe (in one case involving Steele, the officer that had pulled over Glenn and Morris) were at the center of their concerns. Even before 1964, St. Louis had a well-known history of racial strife and racist terror. The deadliest incident of anti-black violence in 20th-century United States history occurred across the Mississippi River in East St. Louis during the 1917 riots, when whites marched on black neighborhoods, viciously attacking them and burning their homes. The death toll among African Americans was estimated at close to 200, while 6,000 were left homeless. In 1960, St. Louis police had rounded up hundreds of black men when a white woman alleged that a group of black men had abducted and raped her. While local newspapers inflamed the situation, when inconsistencies began to appear in her story, the woman later recanted and admitted that she had made it up. During this same period, both the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality had been involved in desegregation and anti-discrimination campaigns in the city, their efforts dramatized in CORE’s 1963 protests against the hiring practices of the Jefferson Bank. When 19 organizers — dubbed the Jefferson Bank Nineteen — were arrested by the St. Louis Police Department, the broader community was galvanized and joined the protests.
* * *
Born poor and black in Carbondale, Illinois, in 1927, Eddie Glenn had been sentenced from birth. His father was a railroad laborer and his mother a day worker. His parents separated when he was 11. He was kicked out of school early, told that he “could not learn.” He was sent to a vocational school but dropped out because he could not afford the uniforms. He went in and out of reform schools and juvenile correctional facilities while supporting himself by pickpocketing and gambling. By his mid-20s, his life became defined by the time he spent in the Missouri corrections system: from February 24, 1949, to May 27, 1950, he was jailed for second-degree burglary and grand larceny; from October 25, 1950, to January 23, 1956, he was jailed for first-degree robbery with a deadly weapon; from October 11, 1957, to March 17, 1964, he was jailed for first-degree robbery with a deadly weapon and carrying a concealed weapon.
When Glenn wandered up to Marilyn Morris’s Impala on July 2, 1964, he had been out of jail for less than six months. The encounter sent him back for the rest of his life.
On May 13, 1968, Grant appealed Glenn’s conviction. The state rejected the appeal out of hand and denied Glenn a new trial. He spent the next five years in an 8-by-10-foot cell in B-South, the punitive section of the Maximum Security Unit of the Missouri Penitentiary, alongside what were described as “the most incorrigible of prisoners segregated from the general prison population and prisoners who had become insane.” In the early 1970s, he was removed to the general prison population. His death sentence was reduced to life, and he died in prison in 1985.
Yet long before his death, Glenn’s life had taken on a meaning beyond him. As the black man who allegedly killed Officer McCulloch, he became a figure through which the St. Louis Police Department could project their fears and antipathies toward blacks. Glenn became a signifier for the vulnerability of the police, for their victimization; he became part of the web of stories, told and retold and passed down across generations that hardened the consanguineous loyalties of the St. Louis police and the righteous story of identity of St. Louis Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch. Within the story of Eddie Glenn’s life and Paul McCulloch’s death is the seed of bias shaping Robert McCulloch’s decisions in the Michael Brown case. But that story is far from clear, and may be based, as so many similar stories have been, on a convenient set of lies.
by elfismiles » Wed Oct 08, 2014 3:51 pm
by Luther Blissett » Thu Oct 09, 2014 9:16 am
elfismiles » Wed Oct 08, 2014 2:51 pm wrote:Report: Military Preparing to Respond to Ferguson Riots
Missouri source says authorities plan to shut down airports
by Paul Joseph Watson | October 8, 2014
http://www.infowars.com/report-military ... son-riots/
by Luther Blissett » Thu Oct 09, 2014 9:21 am
Another Police Shooting In St. Louis: White Cop, Black Victim (Updated)
The details are still emerging, but there are already some glaring inconsistencies between the police account and witness accounts.
I'm afraid St. Louis is going to be awash in more protests, but it's far too early to understand exactly what happened here.
What the police and witnesses agree on is that an 18-20 year old black kid was shot by police. That's about where the agreement begins and ends.
This is the statement from St. Louis PD sent to Buzzfeed reporter Jim Dalrymple:An officer working department-approved secondary for a security company, wearing a St. Louis Police Officer's uniform was in the 4100 block of Shaw when he attempted a pedestrian check. The male suspect fled on foot. The officer pursued the suspect. The suspect turned and fired a gun at the officer. Fearing for his safety, the officer returned fire striking the suspect, fatally wounding him. The officer was not injured. A gun was recovered from the scene. The officer is a 32-year old white male. He has been on the force for 6 years. The suspect is a black male believed to be 18-20 years old. As is department policy, the officer has been placed on administrative leave. The investigation is ongoing.
If you are wondering about what a pedestrian check is, it's officer-initiated engagement with someone to verify that they live in that neighborhood. Because evidently it's suspicious to be in a neighborhood you don't live in?
The police statement given to Dalrymple differs drastically from eyewitnesses on the scene. Josh Marshall at TPM got some statements within 15 minutes of the shooting from people in the area.This is what I was told not by an eyewitness but by someone who'd spoken to eyewitnesses and family members within about 15 minutes of the shooting. So it's a pastiche of various accounts.He was leaving the corner store with a sandwich, a pickle and some other food. When he came outside, the sec officer had already been chasing after some other kids, he stopped chasing those kids and told him to stop, too. Instead he ran across the street into the gangway. The sec officer chased him, tased him. Shot him 16 times. The people standing outside as the cops were investigating were saying "they're gonna plant a gun on him.
I want to stress: everything here should be taken as tentative and subject to change as more becomes known. But we do appear to have the kernel of two very different accounts of what transpired.
And then there's this report from Fox2Now:Homicide detectives from the St. Louis police department have been called to the scene of a fatal officer involved shooting in the 4100 block of Shaw Blvd. in south St. Louis.
The shooting occurred around 7:30 pm.
Police say an off-duty officer working a second job attempted pedestrian check. The suspect fled on foot, and officer pursed the suspect. The suspect turned and fired at the officer. The officer fearing for his life returned fire fatally wounding the suspect.
A crowd has gathered at the corner store at Klemm next to the Shaw Market. Some in the crowd say the suspect in his 20’s, was shot 16 times. They also say the suspect was only armed with a sandwich.
Again, there's a vast difference between the police accounts and eyewitness accounts, and no way to figure out what's true and what's not at this point. But it is certainly creating tension. Protesters are already there.
The young man who was shot is Vonderrit Myers, Jr..
Also, this account of a "pedestrian check" in 2013:The St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office has charged 30-year-old Lamont Dukes with resisting arrest after the man allegedly fled from a cop during a "pedestrian check" over the weekend. Our original coverage of the incident is below.
A police officer who thought the suspect might have a gun on him shot and wounded Dukes on Sunday, officials say, sending him to the hospital with wounds in his buttocks and leg.
Dukes, it turns out, was unarmed.
But the officer discharged his firearm "fearing for his safety," police say.
The male cop, 33, is now on administrative leave as is standard procedure with an officer-involved shooting.
Dukes, a resident of the 4300 block of St. Louis Avenue, is meanwhile recovering in the hospital. A judge has issued a $500 cash-only bond.
Pretty low bar to cross to fire a gun at someone, I'd say.
Update 2: The St. Louis PD just held a press briefing where they clarified Mr. Myers' name. They also confirmed that 17 shots were fired by the cop and said that Myers was pursued by the cop because he was "running like he had a gun."
They also began the inevitable process of victim-shaming, by informing the press that Mr. Myers was no angel, and was known to law enforcement authorities. There is a police report from June of this year where Myers was arrested for allegedly resisting arrest and an improper use of a weapon.
Note that these appear to be charges, not convictions. He should be, therefore, presumed innocent.
Beyond that, they tossed a lot of confusion into the mix that is quite difficult to sort out. Until I can get it all straight, I'm going to wait to add it to this post.
Update 3: Here's an updated report from Buzzfeed on the press conference:The incident that led to the shooting began about 7:30 p.m. CT when an off-duty officer noticed three men near the corner of Shaw Blvd. and Klemm St. in St. Louis. Police Chief Sam Dotson said during a news conference that the men began running when they saw the officer, who responded by chasing one of them.
The officer was working as a security guard at the time, but wearing his St. Louis police uniform, Dotson said.
The officer initially lost the man but found him again when he jumped out of a bush. Lt. Col. Alfred Adkins told the Associated Press a struggle then ensued.
“The officer approached, they got into a struggle, they ended up into a gangway, at which time the young man pulled a weapon and shots were fired,” Adkins said. “The officer returned fire and unfortunately the young man was killed.”
According to Dotson, the man fired at least three times. His gun then jammed, though he continued pulling the trigger. The officer fired 17 times. By early Thursday morning, investigators had recovered bullet casings from two guns, Dotson said, as well as a 9 mm Ruger believed to have belonged to the man.
“The ballistic evidence indicates at least three different rounds at the office,” Dotson added.
See why it's confusing? First the officer goes after three guys. One runs. Then hides in bushes and jumps out at officer, according to police. Then Dotson says "three different rounds."
Is that three different rounds from one gun, or three different rounds from three guns? And why would an off-duty moonlighting cop go after three guys without probable cause? Why would someone evading police jump out of the bushes at them?
Way too many questions without answers here.
by Iamwhomiam » Thu Oct 09, 2014 12:34 pm
by seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 02, 2014 8:07 pm
The Ferguson No-Fly Zone Was Instituted to Keep Media Out: Report
By Paula Mejia
Filed: 11/2/14 at 4:26 PM
The Michael Brown shooting and subsequent Ferguson, Missouri, protests rocked the nation in August. Two days after Brown was shot, on August 11th, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States instituted a “no-fly zone," effective in 37 miles of airspace around the city. The restriction lasted several days, but the temporary flight restriction had a bizarre loophole: police helicopters could still patrol through the airspace, and a modification was made to allow commercial flights to still fly through the area in and out of the neighboring Lambert-St. Louis International Airport.
But others—particularly media helicopters—were strictly banned from flying through the airspace.
The Associated Press published a report today revealing that local authorities confirmed in audio recordings from August 12th, the day after the flight ban was instituted, that the purpose of the restriction was to keep news helicopters from circling the area, at the height of the tense protests and standoffs on Ferguson streets.
One such recording features an unnamed FAA manager speaking over the phone about St. Louis County Police Department, who said: “They finally admitted it really was to keep the media out.”
Another FAA manager, in Kansas City, said in a recording that local law enforcement “didn’t want media in there” and “did not care if you ran commercial traffic through this TFR (temporary flight restriction)” all day long.” The manager can be heard on tape asking a St. Louis county police official if an amendment could be made so that commercial flights could still fly through the area, to which the police officer replied: “I have no problem with that whatsoever.”
The report notes that since FAA procedures don’t typically accommodate requests that solely keep news helicopters out of airspaces, managers worded the restriction in such a way that would keep media out, but would allow other air traffic to flow through the area. The U.S. government approved the flight ban, which was requested by local police.
The St. Louis County Police Department previously stated that the no-fly ban was instituted for safety purposes, and insisted that it wasn’t to keep the media from covering the standoffs between protesters and law enforcement. The audio recordings, which AP obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, contradict past statements by law enforcement officials, and suggest that officials were consciously attempting to shield untouched images of protests and civil violence from the news.
Lee Rowland, an American Civil Liberties Union Staff attorney, said that if evidence confirmed the no-fly zone was indeed enacted to restrict media coverage, it would be “extraordinarily troubling and a blatant violation of the press’s First Amendment rights.”
The protests, which followed the August 9th death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, 18, by Officer Darren Wilson, were highly publicized by media reporting on the ground. Officers restricted news crews from filming, arresting some reporters and tear gassing many others. Back in October, a federal judge ruled that the constitutional rights of news crews and protestors had been violated by police.
Local police reportedly told the AP in August and again on Friday that the flight ban was instituted because shots were fired at a police helicopter. Yet the officers didn’t give a report about the alleged shooting, nor did said helicopter show any signs of damage.
The ban was lifted on August 22nd, according to FAA records obtained by AP. Police reportedly wanted to extend it, however, as the name of the officer who shot Brown had not been revealed, nor had the teenager’s funeral occurred. Abolishing the restriction would “bring out the emotions,” confirmed a police official in the audio recordings.
The Los Angeles Times’ Matt Pearce tweeted on Sunday that the resistance to free press in Ferguson mirrored the sharp restrictions imposed on the media by New York City police officials during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. According to a report by The Nation, news helicopters were grounded at Zuccotti Park, reporters on the ground were kept in a “press pen” and others who got closer were “rouged up, detained and arrested.”
by elfismiles » Mon Nov 10, 2014 12:56 am
by Luther Blissett » Mon Nov 17, 2014 5:18 pm
by seemslikeadream » Mon Nov 17, 2014 6:03 pm
by Nordic » Mon Nov 17, 2014 6:50 pm
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