FERGUSON,
Mo. — Michael Brown became so angry when he was stopped by Officer
Darren Wilson on Canfield Drive here on Aug. 9, his face looked “like a demon,'’ the officer would later tell a grand jury.
He
testified that when Mr. Brown reached into the officer’s vehicle and
fought him for his gun, Mr. Brown was so physically overpowering that
the officer “felt like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.”
And
when Mr. Brown ran away and then turned to face Officer Wilson, the
officer recalled, he did not raise his hands in a gesture of retreat, as
many neighbors have said – he made “a grunting, like aggravated sound,”
clenched his left hand into a fist, tucked his right hand under his
shirt toward his waistband and began running at the officer, who shot
him dead.
That
account, a vivid and vastly different version from what many people
believe happened on Aug. 9, was given by Officer Wilson when he
testified before a St. Louis County grand jury in September.
The
officer’s recollections of that day, told over several hours, was part
of a trove of thousands of pages of documents released to the public on
Monday after the county prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, announced that
the grand jury had decided to bring no criminal charges in the case.
Officer
Wilson’s version of events was just one part of a vast catalog of
testimony and other evidence that the grand jurors absorbed during the
three months that they heard the case. Yet it appeared to have helped
convince the jurors, a group of nine whites and three African-Americans,
that the officer had committed no crime when he killed Mr. Brown. On
Monday, the announcement that there was no indictment set off violent
protests, burning and looting throughout the beleaguered St. Louis
suburb of Ferguson.
Most
grand jury proceedings are swift and simple: a few witnesses are
called, the prosecutor makes the case for an indictment and the jurors
vote.
But
the grand jury in the Wilson case met for an extraordinarily long
session, hearing what the prosecutor said was “absolutely everything”
that could be considered testimony or evidence in the case. While what
happens in the grand jury room is almost always kept secret, Mr.
McCulloch insisted on making the transcripts of the proceedings
available to the public immediately after the session concluded. Unlike
most defendants, Officer Wilson testified before the grand jury.
The
grand jurors in the Wilson case met in a St. Louis County courthouse on
25 separate days. They heard 70 hours of testimony from roughly 60
witnesses. And they confronted a jumble of forensics reports, police
radio logs, medical documents and tapes of F. B. I interviews with
bystanders.
After
three months of hearing evidence, the grand jury began its
deliberations last Friday at 3:04 p.m. By midday on Monday, they were
finished.
Though
the encounter between Officer Wilson and Mr. Brown took place in a
matter of minutes, eyewitness testimony revealed an infinite array of
subtle but crucial variations. Witness after witness took the stand to
describe the same two minutes and agreeing on the broadest strokes: how
it began with the struggle at the window and the first shots, and ended
with Dorian Johnson, who had been walking with Mr. Brown, shouting “they
killed him” and crowds descending on the scene.
Many
witnesses first began to pay attention while the two were wrestling at
the car window, though they often said they could not see enough to know
what was going on. But even when the confrontation broke out into the
open, the accounts diverged.
“I see the officer running behind shooting,” said one witness.
“When he gets out the car he immediately starts to shoot,” said another.
“Let me stop you,” still another said. “He did not take off running after Michael.”
Testimony
about the critical final moments – when Mr. Brown stopped running,
turned and moved back toward Officer Wilson – lay along a spectrum.
Some
hewed closer to Officer Wilson’s recollection. “I could say for sure he
never put his hands up,” said one witness, a man who was working in the
area and did not live there, and whose recollection most strongly
bolstered Officer Wilson’s case. “He ran to the officer full charge.”
Others spoke just as confidently that events unfolded in a completely different way.
“Yes
I personally saw him on his knees with his hands in the air,” one
witness said in a recorded interview with federal officials that was
played for the grand jury before he testified. The prosecutor
questioning that witness did not hide her skepticism of his story,
highlighting contradictions in his various accounts.
“Basically
just about everything that you said on Aug. 13, and much of what you
said today isn’t consistent with the physical evidence that we have in
this case, O.K.,” she said to him.
Prosecutors
did not seem to shy from pointing out discrepancies between multiple
interviews of a single witness, or even at some points exploring the
past criminal history of some witnesses, including Mr. Johnson, Mr.
Brown’s friend. Several witnesses were asked if they felt pressure to
conform to a certain story line, or if they felt fear if their
recollections differed from the popular narrative. Some did acknowledge
such fears, with one talking of losing 15 pounds from stress.
An older man in the nearby housing complex was blunt about what he saw happening.
“You
have to understand the mentality of some of these young guys,” he said,
describing those who flocked to the scene in the immediate aftermath of
the shooting. “They have nothing to do. If they can latch onto
something, they embellish it because they want something to do.”
That
man dismissed the notion that Mr. Brown had raised his hands to the sky
in a gesture that turned into a symbol for the protest movement in
Ferguson. He was also adamant, however, that Mr. Brown had never charged
at Officer Wilson but had staggered, wounded, his arms outstretched in a
gesture of surrender.
“He
had his hands up, palm facing the officer like, ‘O.K., you got me,’ ”
the man recalled, adding at a later point that he himself had once been
shot so he knew what it was like. The prosecutor pointed out that the
distance Mr. Brown covered after turning was farther than the witness
remembered, and a grand juror questioned whether he could really judge
how menacing Mr. Brown appeared to Officer Wilson.
Still
this man’s testimony was like that of several others, in that it
neither matched up perfectly with Officer Wilson’s account nor with the
accounts of those most sympathetic to Mr. Brown. Many witnesses
expressed puzzlement at the moment when Mr. Brown stopped and turned —
"That is something I wrestle with to this day,” one said. Some recalled
shouting out to him at that moment or turning to their family members in
horror. When Mr. Brown moved toward Officer Wilson, one witness said,
he “just went forward like his body was just going down.”
As
the weeks went by, the grand jury studied the brief encounter between
Officer Wilson and Mr. Brown from seemingly every possible angle,
hearing forensic testimony on one day, on another going as a group to
examine a police vehicle similar to Officer Wilson’s. On Nov. 11, the
prosecutors questioned a former superior of Officer Wilson’s in another
police force, asking about his relationship with the African-American
community as well as the standard police practices governing the use of
deadly force (the witness had nothing but positive things to say about
Officer Wilson).
Much
of the forensic evidence, along with public and private autopsy
reports, supported the narrative that Officer Wilson and Mr. Brown had
struggled inside the police car.
A
crime scene investigator described swabbing Wilson’s gun with a Q-tip;
the subsequent D.N.A. report found Mr. Brown’s genetic material on
Officer Wilson’s Sig Sauer pistol. Similarly, D.N.A. from Mr. Brown was
also found on the officer’s uniform pants and shirt.
In
his own testimony, Officer Wilson told jurors that Mr. Brown had
grabbed the gun while the two scuffled at the car. The gun went off
twice, once striking Mr. Brown in the hand and leaving blood splattered
inside the vehicle.
The
medical examiner who performed the initial autopsy showed the grand
jury close to 100 gruesome photos of the wounds from every angle, giving
exhaustive descriptions and lessons in the physics of gunshot wounds.
He
described the soot, or unburned gunpowder, on a graze wound on Brown’s
hand, proof that it was shot at a range of 6 to 9 inches.
Timeline: Tracking the Events in the Wake of Michael Brown’s Shooting
Over
the months, the grand jurors seemed to focus intently on the final
movement Mr. Brown may have made toward Officer Wilson. The prosecutor
asked witness after witness if it looked as if Mr. Brown were reaching
for a weapon, though few said they saw anything like that.
Grand
jurors asked if Mr. Brown, when he was moving toward Officer Wilson,
seemed to have “any kind of expression, a blank look, aggressive look or
anything”? They also had seemingly come to memorize the distances and
challenged witnesses on their memories of the geography of the
confrontation.
Forensic
evidence was also presented that supported Officer Wilson’s statement
that Mr. Brown was moving toward him as he opened fire outside the car,
and continued to approach the officer after being hit by an initial
volley of bullets.
The
distance from the front wheel of the officer’s SUV to Mr. Brown’s body
was 153 feet, 9 inches, an investigator said. Farther away from the car,
the investigator showed with photographs, were two blood-spatter
patterns – evidence showing that Mr. Brown was moving toward the
officer, and the car, when he was killed in the second flurry of shots.
The
medical examiner described the succession of bullet wounds to the chest
and face that, in his view, would not have immediately incapacitated
Mr. Brown. The prosecutors repeatedly questioned the doctor about this,
driving home that Mr. Brown could have still been mobile after the
initial several shots.
They
seemed intent on emphasizing this point, which supports Officer
Wilson’s description of Brown lunging toward him despite serious wounds.
A final shot through the top of Mr. Brown’s head, the medical experts all agreed, brought him down almost instantly.
After
the shooting, Officer Wilson was taken to an area hospital, where a
doctor found that he had a “facial contusion,” the medical term for a
bruise. He was given a prescription for an anti-inflammatory drug.
Since
they were not sequestered the way trial jury sometimes are, the grand
jurors were also aware of the outside pressure to reach a decision.
“I
know Mr. McCulloch before has said there is a process and this is the
process we have to follow,” one juror said in late September. “Is the
NAACP, or these other, you know, coalitions, are they confirming what he
is saying to the people of Ferguson?”
Last
Friday afternoon, the jurors indicated that they were ready to begin
deliberating. The two assistant St. Louis County prosecutors who had
presented the case gave them information on the charges that they could
possibly bring against Officer Wilson: murder, voluntary manslaughter
and involuntary manslaughter.
“We
were trying to give you a balanced presentation of the evidence,” said
Sheila Whirley, one of the prosecutors, according to the transcripts.
“So you might see us go back and forth because we were trying to keep it
balanced for you, and get to the truth and hopefully that was
accomplished. And I think you are going to make the right decision.”
