In an exclusive interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos, police
officer Darren Wilson, right, breaks his silence about the shooting of
Michael Brown.
By David Voreacos, Jennifer Oldham, Elise Young and Andrew Harris
Dorian
Johnson said he was surprised when Big Mike grabbed the cigarillos on
that hot Saturday in August, shoving a store clerk as he made for the
exit. He hadn’t known the teenager long, Johnson told grand jurors, but
“he didn’t strike me as a person who would do anything like that.” The two had walked to the Ferguson Market in the morning because they wanted to smoke some pot, Johnson said, and needed the narrow, thin cigars to roll the blunts. Michael Brown -- everybody called him Big Mike -- had graduated from high school and was about
to head to college, and Johnson said they talked about the future. Then his buddy stole the cigarillos.
“It shocked me, it shocked me a lot,” Johnson testified. “He was basically laughing it off, be cool, be calm.” He said Brown, who was 6’5’’ and 289 pounds, didn’t put the cigarillos in his pocket but carried them, several in each hand, as they walked “in plain sight” down the middle of Canfield Drive.
Officer Darren Wilson at first drove past them in his police cruiser, then backed up. Johnson said he yelled out, “Get the f--- on the sidewalk.” Brown approached the car, and Wilson reached out and grabbed him by the shirt, Johnson said. Within minutes, Brown was dead.
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Challenging Witnesses
Thousands of pages of testimony and documents released by St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch show how grand jurors and investigators challenged witnesses, asking skeptical questions of those who said the shooting was unjustified. On the stand, several said they’d lied when interviewed by investigators.Wilson testified for four hours. He said Brown strode aggressively to his police cruiser, said “f--- what you have to say,” punched him in the face and wrestled for his gun. The officer said the gun misfired twice before he shot from inside the car and misfired a third time before a second shot.
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Gun’s Smoke
“As he is coming towards me, I tell, keep telling him to get on the ground, he doesn’t,” Wilson testified. “I remember seeing the smoke from the gun and I kind of looked at him and he’s still coming at me, he hadn’t slowed down.”After firing, Wilson backpedaled and urged Brown to get on the ground, he said. The teenager looked “like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him,” until he got 8 to 10 feet away. “I’m backpedaling pretty good because I know if he reaches me, he’ll kill me.”
Wilson continued, “People asked why would you chase him if he was running away.” He said it was because he “still posed a threat, not only to me, to anybody that confronted him.”
The panel began hearing evidence 11 days after the shooting, which had fanned racial tensions in a community where most of the residents are black and most police officers are white. Some witnesses had said Brown’s arms were raised in surrender, or that his back was turned to the officer. Grand jurors reviewed three autopsies, hundreds of photographs, recorded statements, medical records and DNA and blood samples.
Hostile Crowd
They heard from an investigator from the medical examiner’s office, who described how he saw Brown’s body sprawled on the street, the “Big Mike” tattoo on his forearm visible. In his pocket were two lighters, two $5 bills and a bag of what appeared to be marijuana, the investigator said. He had gunshot wounds in the head, chest and right arm.Law enforcement officers and investigators described finding shell casings from Wilson’s .40 caliber Sig Sauer pistol, and said Brown’s body lay 154 feet from the officer’s Chevrolet Tahoe. They recalled finding Brown’s red baseball cap, bracelets and sandals on the asphalt.
After the shooting, Wilson said, a hostile crowd gathered and he drove himself in a sergeant’s car back to the police station. There he put his gun in an evidence bag, he said. Investigators later tested the gun and Wilson’s uniform for Brown’s DNA.
Brown’s blood was found inside Wilson’s vehicle and on the gun, which was fired twice in the car, McCulloch said.
Brown’s Wounds
The medical examiner who autopsied Brown described the six bullets to his body, and two graze wounds. Brown had soot, or unburned gunpowder, on one hand with a graze wound, indicating the shot was fired from a distance of 6 to 9 inches, the doctor said. One shot pierced a lung, another penetrated an eye. The final shot was to the top of his head, the examiner said.Several witnesses admitted to the grand jury that they’d not told the truth when they were interviewed after the shooting by St. Louis County and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who canvassed the neighborhood.
One resident told the FBI that Brown fell to his knees and put his hands up, that Wilson fired and Brown fell forward, and that Wilson stood over him and shot again. The witness was challenged on the stand in the grand jury room.
“You told the story that had a bunch of lies, isn’t that right?” asked Kathi Alizadeh, one of two assistant prosecuting attorneys in the case.
Backtracking Witnesses
The witness backtracked, saying the comments to the FBI were based on “assumption” and “common sense.” One woman admitted she lied to FBI agents on Sept. 30 when she claimed to have been a witness, saying she repeated what her boyfriend claimed took place.“I just wanted to be a part of something and tell them what my boyfriend said because he wasn’t there” to be interviewed, she said. “I didn’t know if they were going to come back and try to talk to him, I just wanted his story to be out there.” She said she testified after the Justice Department granted her immunity and promised not to prosecute her for giving false statements.
Residents often offered glimpses of violence, gang activity and tender moments in Brown’s neighborhood. Several said he was a beloved figure in the apartment complex where he lived. On the morning he was shot, Brown stopped to tell a construction worker that he should turn to Jesus Christ to control his anger.
Brown talked about God and wanted to take on household repair jobs for people of little means, according to one resident. “Like the boys in the neighborhood, he going to go to school and make something with his life,” she said. “I told him, ‘That’s good, keep that thought and keep positive, and everything will work out fine.’”
‘Angry Faces’
She spotted him on the morning of the shooting wearing what she called yellow “bumblebee socks” pulled to his knees, a red St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap and flip-flops “that he loved so much.”A state highway patrol chemist testified he determined that a plastic bag found in Brown’s pocket contained 1.589 grams of marijuana, saying it was “a little bit smaller than a baseball. Not much, though.”
Johnson, who said he said he saw himself as a mentor to Brown, described the moments before the shooting. He said after Wilson and Brown tussled through the police car window, the officer opened the door, then closed it, then thrust his arm out the window before grabbing Brown’s shirt around the neck, according to Johnson. A tug of war ensued.
“They are yelling and cussing,” Johnson said. “And neither one of them can calm down, they both have angry faces on while they are talking.”
Probable Cause
Wilson then said he would shoot, Johnson said. He said the officer fired one shot, not two, in the car.“I saw the gun and the barrel,” Johnson said, saying it brought back the memory of the time he himself was shot. “It’s the worse pain I can ever imagine.”
Brown turned and ran, Johnson said.
“When Big Mike ran past me, he saw me, he looked directly at me and he said, ‘Keep running, Bro,’” Johnson said.
The two prosecutors, Alizadeh and Sheila Whirley, didn’t press the grand jury for an indictment. They spoke to the panel on Nov. 11 about possible defenses for Wilson.
‘Complete Defenses’
Self-defense and the lawful use of force to make an arrest were both “complete defenses,” Alizadeh said. She said that while probable cause was the standard when charging someone with a crime, a conviction would require much more.At a trial, she said, the state must “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the person did not act in lawful self-defense or was not justified in the use of force.”
Alizadeh said that neither she nor Whirley “have ever had this experience before” and that “there’s only been one grand jury investigation on an officer’s use of force in the past 15 years that anybody can remember, so we’re kind of not sure how to proceed.”
“We’ll get it,” Whirley said.
The two gave their final explanation of the law 10 days later. It took grand jurors two days of deliberations to clear Wilson.
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