On Aug. 9, 2014, Michael Brown and a friend were walking in the middle of Canfield Drive, a two-lane street in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri, when a police officer drove by and told them to use the sidewalk.
After words were exchanged, the white officer confronted the 18-year-old Brown, who was black. The situation escalated, with the officer and Brown scuffling. The officer shot and killed Brown, who was unarmed.
A timeline of key events that followed the shooting:
AUG. 9, 2014: Brown’s bloodied body remains in the street for four hours in the summer heat. People in the neighborhood later lash out at police, saying they mistreated the body.
AUG. 10, 2014: After a candlelight vigil, people protesting Brown’s death smash car windows and carry away armloads of food, alcohol and other looted items from stores. Some protesters stand on police cars, taunting officers. A QuikTrip convenience store on West Florissant Avenue, just blocks from where Brown was shot, is looted and burned. Other businesses are damaged or destroyed. It’s the first of several nights of unrest. The protests help solidify the Black Lives Matter movement formed in the wake of the 2012 death of black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida and the acquittal of the neighborhood watch volunteer who shot him.
AUG. 11, 2014: The FBI opens an investigation into Brown’s death, and two men who said they saw the shooting tell reporters that Brown had his hands raised when the officer fired repeatedly. That night, police in riot gear fire tear gas and rubber bullets to try to disperse a crowd of protesters.
AUG. 14, 2014: The Missouri State Highway Patrol takes control of security, relieving Ferguson and St. Louis County officers of their law enforcement authority after days of unrest. The shift in command comes after images from the protests show many officers equipped with military-style gear, including armored vehicles, body armor and assault rifles. In photos circulated online, officers are seen pointing their weapons at demonstrators.
AUG. 15, 2014: Police identify the officer who shot Brown as Darren Wilson, who had been with the department since 2011. They also release surveillance video that shows Brown grabbing large amounts of cigarillos from behind the counter of the Ferguson Market and pushing a worker who confronts him as he leaves the convenience store. Police say Brown took almost $50 worth of cigarillos. The release of the video upsets protesters.
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AUG. 20, 2014: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder visits Ferguson to offer assurances about the investigation into Brown’s death and to meet with investigators and Brown’s family. A grand jury begins hearing evidence to determine whether Wilson should be charged.
NOV. 24, 2014: St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch announces that the grand jury has decided not to indict Wilson. Protests that were passionate but peaceful earlier in the day turn violent. At least a dozen buildings and multiple police cars are burned, officers are hit by rocks and batteries, and reports of gunfire force some St. Louis-bound flights to be diverted.
NOV. 29, 2014: Wilson announces his resignation from the Ferguson Police Department effective immediately.
MARCH 4, 2015: The U.S. Department of Justice announces that it will not prosecute Wilson in Brown’s death but releases a scathing report that finds racial bias in the way police and courts in the community treat black people (Timeline 1-3).
The big question is whether Wilson legitimately believed, as police have said, that Brown posed a threat to his safety or his life. Some witnesses painted a different picture, saying Brown had his hands raised in surrender.
Wilson, who was in a patrol vehicle, initially stopped Brown for jaywalking, because he and a friend were walking in the middle of Canfield Drive, a quiet street located off busy West Florissant Avenue. Brown was not armed.
Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson, and police officials agree that Wilson got out of the car and that he and Brown had a physical struggle, although which of them started it is at issue.
Two autopsies, one of them commissioned by the Brown family, found that six bullets struck Brown, all of them from the front. He had wounds to one hand, an arm, his chest and head. The St. Louis County coroner’s report said the hand wound showed traces of material that could have come from the barrel of the gun, suggesting that the shot was fired at close range. A third autopsy was ordered by the U.S. Justice Department but has not been made public.
When the fatal shot struck Brown on the top of the head, he was roughly 35 feet from Wilson’s vehicle, indicating that at some point he had moved away from it.
Police say that when Wilson got out of his SUV, Brown tried to shove him back into the vehicle and reached for the officer’s gun, prompting the first shots.
Johnson said that after telling the teens to get on the sidewalk, Wilson started to drive away, then reversed his vehicle and struck Brown with the SUV’s door. He said the officer then got out of the car, struggled with Brown and began to shoot.
Some witnesses said Brown was shot while fleeing from the officer, a scenario not supported by the autopsies. Some, including Johnson, said he ran but then turned and held his hands up in surrender.
Police said he turned back toward the car and charged the officer, who fired to protect himself.
Brown, who was 18, had recently graduated from high school and was set to begin his freshman year at Vatterott College. He was shot to death at around noon on Aug. 9. in front of his grandmother’s house. Shortly before the shooting, Brown had gotten into a scuffle with a store clerk over a box of cigars.
Wilson is a 28-year-old white police officer, who has been with the Ferguson Police Department for six years. He had no prior disciplinary record. When he stopped Brown, he was unaware of the cigar incident (Suggs 1-3).
When 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, police officers shared a video showing Brown with his hands around a shopkeeper's neck as he makes off with a carton of cigarillos.
Police called the incident a strong-arm robbery and argued that Brown had brought the same level of violence to his confrontation with officer Darren Wilson moments later.
But previously unreleased surveillance video casts doubt on whether Brown robbed the store shortly before he was fatally shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson.
Jason Pollock, the filmmaker who discovered the video, says the footage shows Brown exchanging drugs for a bag of cigarillos around 1 a.m. on Aug. 9, 2014, about 11 hours before he was killed.
The video doesn't clearly show what was exchanged but shows Brown leaving behind the cigarillos.
The new footage is a part of Pollock’s new documentary “Strange Fruit,” which debuted Saturday at the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. The documentary suggests that Brown’s argument the next morning was over getting his things back.
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Pollock says the video is proof that Brown did not rob the store.
“They wanted us to think Michael robbed the store because they needed us to think that Michael was aggressive. Michael was handed the bag in the video, the clerk puts it in a plastic bag and hands it over the counter to Michael Brown,” Pollock said. “That’s not stealing [from] the store.”
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The convenience store, Ferguson Market and Liquor, strongly denies the documentary’s claims (Osunsami and Knox 1).
Three months after it began its work, the grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, chose Monday not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson for killing black, unarmed teenager Michael Brown last August. In this, the grand jury of nine whites and three blacks was no different from grand juries all over the country that previously have excused police officers following shooting deaths like this. Our nation’s legal standards, its broad definitions of the use of “deadly force,” make it extremely difficult for police officers ever to face criminal charges even when an unarmed citizen dies after an altercation like this.
St. Louis County prosecutor Bob McCulloch, a prosecutor from a police family, a man with a history that presaged this controversy, did not belabor this elemental point during his long statement Monday evening explaining the grand jury’s decision. Instead, he focused on two evidentiary themes. First, that eyewitness testimony from bystanders incriminating Wilson was ambiguous and conflicting. And, second, that this testimony also was inconsistent with the physical evidence, the forensic work, recovered from the crime scene. This evidence suggested that Brown was not fleeing Wilson, and did not necessarily have his hands in the air in surrender, when the fatal shots were fired on August 9th.
Instead, McCulloch said, several witnesses testified that Brown had charged at Wilson just before the police officer shot him to death. And Wilson himself, testifying for four hours, told grand jurors that he felt his life was threatened by Brown. When they first scuffled at the Wilson’s police car, the officer testified, he felt “like a 5-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan.”
Later, as he and Brown confronted each other on that hot summer street, Wilson told grand jurors that Brown “looked at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.’
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… This was not a typical grand jury proceeding in which only a few witnesses testify, the prosecutor tightly controls what grand jurors hear, and the suspect does not testify at length about why he should not be charged.
How do we know it is rare for a prosecutor to manage a grand jury in this fashion? We know because the grand jury process has been pro forma in most jurisdictions and because prosecutors almost always get an indictment from them when they want one. On the federal level, Five Thirty-Eight reported last night, “U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them.” That’s about 0.01 percent of the time (Cohen 1-2).
APRIL 23, 2015: Lawyers for Brown’s family sue the city of Ferguson, Wilson and Jackson.
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JULY 10, 2015: [Governor] Nixon signs into law legislation limiting cities’ ability to profit from traffic tickets and court fines, the first significant step taken by state lawmakers to address concerns raised after Brown’s death. Among other things, the law lowers the percentage of revenue most cities can collect from traffic fines and fees from 30% to 20%.
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JUNE 20, 2017: A federal judge in St. Louis approves a wrongful-death lawsuit settlement that awards Brown’s parents $1.5 million.
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AUG. 7, 2018: In a stunning upset, Ferguson City Councilman Wesley Bell defeats 28-year incumbent McCulloch in the Democratic primary for St. Louis County prosecutor. Bell, who is black, was unopposed in the November election and took office in January 2019. McCulloch, who is white, was seen as an old-school, law-and-order prosecutor who drew criticism for his handling of the Wilson investigation. Bell ran on a platform of reforms, saying he would work to reduce incarcerations and start a unit to investigate shootings involving officers (Timeline 4-5).
A new review of the 2014 police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, of 18-year-old Michael has concluded that no murder or manslaughter charges against former officer Darren Wilson are warranted.
The five-month secret review of the August 2014 fatal shooting led St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell to conclude he couldn't prove those allegations in a court of law, he said Thursday.
However, Bell said, "Our investigation does not exonerate Darren Wilson."
He said the reinvestigation into the actions of Wilson, who is white, for the death of Brown, who was Black — which sparked unrest in Ferguson long before America had learned the name of George Floyd — was necessary.
"Because of the significance of this case to this community and because the family asked, I believed it was necessary to conduct a reexamination of the evidence in the case and come to our own conclusion," Bell said.
Bell said thousands of pages of documents, including witness statements, forensic reports and other evidence, were examined in his review.
"The question for this office was a simple one: Could we prove beyond a reasonable doubt that when Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown he committed murder or manslaughter under Missouri law," the prosecutor said. "After an independent and in-depth review of the evidence we cannot conclude that he did" (Romero 1-2).
In the aftermath of the shooting, [Michael] Brown [Senior] said he was so angry that every time he spoke, he started feeling changes in his body. He eventually turned the anger into activism and today works with young people and counsels others who have lost loved ones to violence.
“I went through those stages [of anger], but what people don’t understand is that being angry wasn’t doing nothing but killing myself,” Brown said. “I can’t just stay angry … I knew I had to get somewhere with a little bit of peace or I would lose, my family would lose.”
Five years later, Brown said he is in a little better space. “I beat myself up for a bunch of years thinking it was my fault, because you vow when the child comes out of the womb that you will protect him,” he said.
“Michael’s legacy is through me. I am his legacy. We stand in the public, try to do the right thing, keep the work going. Try to pull families and communities together” Robertson and Salter 1-2).
[Paste the following link on Google to watch video of Michael Brown twice in the convenience store]
Works cited:
Cohen, Andrew. “Law and Disorder in Ferguson.” The Marshall Project, November 25, 2014. Net. https://www.themarshallproject.org/2014/11/25/law-and-disorder-in-ferguson
Osunsami, Steve, and Knox, Matt. “Surveillance Video May Shed Light on Ferguson Police Shooting of Michael Brown.” ABC News, March 13, 2017. Net. https://abcnews.go.com/US/surveillance-video-sheds-light-ferguson-police-shooting-mike/story?id=46088363
Roberson, Jeff, and Salter, Jim. “Ferguson: Five Years On from the Shooting of Michael Brown.” The Guardian, August 10, 2019. Net. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/10/ferguson-five-years-on-from-the-police-shooting-of-michael-brown
Romero, Dennis. “No Charges for Officer Who Shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, after Follow-Up Probe.” NBC News, July 30, 2020, Net. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/no-charges-officer-who-shot-michael-brown-ferguson-missouri-after-n1235382
Suggs, Ernie. “The Michael Brown Killing: What You Need to Know.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Net. https://www.ajc.com/news/ferguson-brown-faq/
"Timeline of Events in Shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson.” AP News, August 8, 2019. Net. https://apnews.com/article/9aa32033692547699a3b61da8fd1fc62
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