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Little Is Known About Ferguson Police Officer Who Shot Michael Brown

Little Is Known About Ferguson Police Officer Who Shot Michael Brown

By Jeremy Kohler, David Hunn, and Robert Patrick, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

ST. LOUIS — Twelve days after he shot and killed an unarmed teen, the Ferguson police officer behind the gun remains an enigma.

While state and federal prosecutors investigate whether crimes were committed in the Aug. 9 killing of Mike Brown, and hundreds march to protest Brown’s death, Officer Darren Wilson has not been seen in public or made any public statements.

By the time police released his name Friday, any social media accounts had been deactivated. Just one photograph of him emerged, apparently scraped from his father’s Facebook account by Yahoo News before the account was deactivated.

A handful of supporters have spoken on his behalf; none from his inner circle. Union officials from Missouri Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 15 did not return calls and messages seeking comment last week. His lawyer has declined to comment.

Some have said they saw Wilson shoot Brown after Brown raised his hands in surrender. No one has publicly corroborated what police said was Wilson’s version of the confrontation, in which Brown reached into the police car and attacked him. Perhaps the most widely shared telling of what is purported to be his perspective came from a woman who identified herself as a friend of Wilson and spoke on a radio show using a pseudonym.

Wilson hasn’t responded to calls or texts. Neither have his close friends or family members.

He’s taken a different path than central figures of almost every other major national crime story from the past decade. In those cases, clues could be found on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, or they were described by friends and loved ones.

Additionally, authorities have released essential details in other major crimes. That has not happened in Ferguson.

“I can’t remember any time in the last 10 years, at least, where somebody’s completely gone into hiding, for fear of his life,” said Jonathan Bernstein, president of Bernstein Crisis Management in Los Angeles. “Frankly, if I’d been advising his family, the first thing I would have said was hide. In the near term, saving his life is more important than anything else.”

Bernstein, who has written textbooks and training manuals on crisis management, said he thought it unlikely that the disappearance of Wilson and his family from online social media sites was happenstance.

“He’s had some advice to dive down a hole and take cover for now,” Bernstein said. “They’re doing everything possible.”

A few friends have stepped forward. Kevin Gregory, 22, a friend of Wilson for nine years and an aspiring police officer, said he rode along with Wilson on a relatively slow Tuesday night in March and came away impressed with Wilson as a dedicated officer who loved helping people.

“There isn’t even the slightest doubt in my mind: I’m 100 percent sure he feared for his life,” Gregory said. “He reacted just like you’re trained to be as a police officer. You fire at center mass. The largest part of the body of the threat. You’re not trained to fire a few times; you’re trained to fire until the threat is over, and that’s how you get home safely to your family.”

Gregory said there was one condition of the ride-along: He had to wear a bulletproof vest.

“(Wilson) explained, ‘You’ll see some stuff you probably haven’t seen in other places,'” Gregory recalled.

He said they responded that night to help ambulance workers with an intoxicated woman of about 40 who was cursing and demanding to be taken to a hospital. He said Wilson told her several times to calm down, explaining he couldn’t let her in the ambulance if it would be dangerous for the paramedics.

“It was more warnings than I think I would give,” Gregory said. “But he made the determination that no way he could let her get on.” He suggested the family take her in their car; the woman’s mother and a sibling took her inside.

More details about Wilson’s life were found in public records. He was born in May 1986 in Fort Worth, Texas, to Tonya and John Wilson. Tonya Wilson was a 19-year-old receptionist at the Metro YMCA and John Wilson, 32, was a teacher and coach in a public school.

The Wilsons divorced in 1989; his mother married Tyler Harris and moved to the St. Louis area. They had a son, Jared, in 1991. In the late 1990s, they moved into a four-bedroom, two bath house in St. Peters. The Harrises divorced in 1998, and Tonya Harris later married Daniel Robert Durso.

In February 1998, Tonya Harris was charged in St. Charles County with three counts of stealing by deceit for allegedly cashing bogus checks at Truman Bank. In May 2000, she was charged with stealing and forgery. The complaint claims that she took another woman’s credit card and passed a forged check for $9,000. She pleaded guilty to both cases and was sentenced to five years’ probation in 2001.

The Dursos struggled financially, filing for bankruptcy in June 2002. On Nov. 18 of that year, Tonya Durso died of blockages in arteries in her lungs.

In October 2003, court records show, Tyler Harris filed for limited guardianship of Darren Wilson, so he could register for school and obtain medical insurance. Wilson wanted to finish his senior year at St. Charles West High School. His father signed off on the guardianship, which was canceled when Wilson turned 18.

He graduated from St. Charles West High School in 2004 where he is listed on several pages of the yearbook. The first page shows him with a mop of hair, more like a surfer or rock star than the crew-cut police officer depicted in a recent photo. He was on the yearbook staff and played varsity hockey.

Wilson married Ashley Brown on Oct. 15, 2011. They bought a house in Troy, in Lincoln County, in June 2012, but sold it a year later, two months after Darren Wilson filed for divorce, and four months after the couple separated. The divorce was finalized on Nov. 18, 2013.

He bought a home in October 2013 in Crestwood, which he now shares with his girlfriend, Ferguson police officer Barbara Spradling.

Stephen Deere and Walker Moskop of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.

Photo: St. Louis Post-Dispatch/MCT/David Carson

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Missouri Burning: Why Ferguson’s Inferno Is No Surprise

Missouri Burning: Why Ferguson’s Inferno Is No Surprise

The past week’s unfolding tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, with its militarized and overwhelmingly white police force confronting angry and hopeless African-Americans, is not a story unique to that place or moment. Many cities and towns in this country confront the same problems of poverty, alienation, and inequality as metropolitan St. Louis — or even worse.

But beneath the familiar narrative there is a deeper history that reflects the unfinished agenda of race relations  – and the persistence of poisonous prejudice that has never been fully cleansed from the American mainstream.

For decades, Missouri has spawned or attracted many of the nation’s most virulent racists, including neo-Nazis and the remnants of the once-powerful Ku Klux Klan. Associated with violent criminality and crackpot religious extremism, these fringe groups could never wield much influence in the post-civil rights era. Beyond those marginalized outfits, however, exists another white supremacist group whose leaders have long enjoyed the patronage of right-wing Republican politicians.

The Council of Conservative Citizens, headquartered in St. Louis, is a living legacy of Southern “white resistance” to desegregation, with historical roots in the so-called “citizens’ councils” that sprung up during the 1950s as a “respectable” adjunct to the Klan. Its website currently proclaims that the CCC is “the only serious nationwide activist group that sticks up for white rights!” What that means, more specifically, is promoting hatred of blacks, Jews, gays and lesbians, and Latino immigrants, while extolling the virtues of the “Southern way of life,” the Confederacy, and even slavery.

The group’s website goes on to brag that the CCC is the only group promoting “white rights” whose meetings regularly feature “numerous elected officials, important authors, talk-show hosts, active pastors, and other important people” as speakers.

Although that boast may be exaggerated, it isn’t hollow. Founded in 1985 by the ax handle-wielding Georgia segregationist Lester Maddox and a group of white activists, the CCC remained obscure to most Americans until 1998, when media exposure of its ties to prominent congressional Republicans led to the resignation of Mississippi senator Trent Lott as Majority Leader. Six years later, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit group monitoring racist activity in the United States, reported that the CCC had hosted as many as 38 federal, state, and local officials at its meetings (all of them Republicans except one Democrat) – despite a warning from the Republican National Committee against associating with the hate group.

Over the years, the CCC’s friends in high places included such figures as former Missouri senator John Ashcroft, who shared much of the CCC agenda as governor, when he opposed “forced desegregation” of St. Louis schools – along with the CCC members who served on the city’s school board. When President George W. Bush appointed Ashcroft as U.S. Attorney General, the CCC openly celebrated, declaring in its newsletter that “Our Ship Has Come In.”

Recently, many fewer Republican officials have been willing to associate in public with the CCC’s racist leaders. Then again, however, Ashcroft himself tended to meet secretly with those same bigots, while outwardly shunning them. When asked about his connections with the group during his confirmation hearings in 2001, he swore that he had no inkling of its racist and anti-Semitic propaganda – a very implausible excuse given the CCC’s prominence in St. Louis while he served as governor.

Despite the CCC’s presence, Missouri is home to many fine and decent people, of course – but malignant traces of the group, and the racial animus it represents, have spread far beyond the state’s borders. The most obvious example is Rush Limbaugh, the “conservative” cultural phenomenon who grew up south of St. Louis in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and who has earned a reputation as a racial agitator over many years on talk radio, where he began by doing mocking bits in “black” dialect.

In 1998, the talk jock defended Trent Lott when other conservatives were demanding his resignation over the politician’s CCC connection. Today, Limbaugh echoes the CCC line on the Brown killing, which suggests coldly that the unarmed teenager deserved his fate because he may have been a suspect in shoplifting or smoked marijuana. Why would a young man’s life be worth less than a box of cigars? Back in Rush’s home state, the answer is all too obvious.

Photo: Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/MCT

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Michael Brown Shooting In Ferguson Has A Global Audience

Michael Brown Shooting In Ferguson Has A Global Audience

By Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING — Amnesty International has sent monitors to the scene. Palestinians are tweeting advice on how to cope with tear gas. Tibetan monks have showed up to offer prayers. Russian officials, Iran’s official news agency, and China’s state-run media are offering lectures on human rights abuses.

What started as a small-town police shooting of an unarmed 18-year-old black man in suburban St. Louis has quickly become an international incident.

As the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., stretches into a second week, scenes of cops in military-like vehicles clashing with protesters are being beamed around the world. A global audience is watching the events with shock and sympathy — but also a sense of superiority and schadenfreude.

For countries that are often on the receiving end of human-rights lectures from Washington, the situation in Ferguson, Mo. — the violence, the race troubles and arrests of American journalists — has presented an irresistible opportunity to turn the tables and accuse the United States of hypocrisy.

“The Ferguson incident once again demonstrates that even in a country that has for years tried to play the role of an international human rights judge and defender, there is still much room for improvement at home,” China’s state-run New China News Agency said in a commentary published Monday, just hours before Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon ordered National Guard troops into the city. “Obviously, what the United States needs to do is to concentrate on solving its own problems rather than always pointing fingers at others.”

But Chinese media haven’t been devoting as extensive coverage to the Ferguson unrest as have their counterparts in Russia, where the story been featured prominently on TV news.

Russian officials have taken an even more strident tone — perhaps not surprising, given the toxic atmosphere between Moscow and Washington of late. Taking note of the unrest in Ferguson, the Foreign Ministry urged “our American partners to pay more attention to restoring order in their own country before imposing their dubious experience on other nations.”

The United States “has positioned itself as a ‘bastion of human rights’ and is actively engaged in ‘export of democracy’ on a systematic basis,” but “serious violations of basic human rights and barbaric practices thrive” in the country, Moscow said in remarks Friday responding to a U.S. report to a United Nations committee on racial discrimination.

In Iran on Monday, Ferguson was top news, even overshadowing a magnitude 6.2 earthquake that injured dozens. The Islamic Republic News Agency, the government’s official news service, commented that “violence has become institutionalized in the U.S. in recent years, but since President Obama, the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner, came to the White House, the violence has intensified, and now it has erupted against blacks in Ferguson.”

Even in tiny countries such as Sri Lanka, which doesn’t have particularly strained ties with the United States the Ferguson situation has become a cudgel to hit back at Washington.

Taking umbrage over a U.S. security warning to Americans on Aug. 8 in connection with an increase in protests and anti-American sentiment in Sri Lanka, the island nation’s Daily News opined: “For the U.S. to issue a travel warning for Sri Lanka does seem odd at a time when there are race riots in Missouri.”

“The world is concerned about gun violence and its toll in the U.S., and even though the U.S. president says he is concerned as well, he has not been able to do anything about its epidemic prevalence,” the paper said.

Scenes of tear gas, Molotov cocktails, and flash grenades in Ferguson have surprised many in Egypt, the Palestinian territories and other places where such violence is more common.

A popular blogger in Cairo, who writes under the pseudonym The Big Pharaoh, tweeted a picture from Ferguson and commented: “Nope, this is not Egypt or Turkey. This is in the USA.”

Mariam Barghouti, a university student and blogger in the West Bank city of Ramallah, has tweeted out tips for reporters and others in Ferguson who face tear gas from police.

“Remember to not touch your face when tear-gassed or put water on it. Instead use milk or coke!” she wrote last week.

After taking the highly unusual step of sending human rights monitors to Ferguson, London-based Amnesty International on Sunday called for state and federal probes into Brown’s death, as well as the tactics of Ferguson police. Atop the group’s U.S. website, its “Stand With Ferguson” campaign gets equal billing with its “Gaza Crisis” and “Panic in Iraq” briefings.

“Amnesty International has a long and tested history of monitoring and investigating police conduct, not just in foreign countries, but right here at home in the United States,” Amnesty USA executive director Steven W. Hawkins said in a statement. “Our delegation traveled to Missouri to let the authorities in Ferguson know that the world is watching.”

AFP Photo/Michael B. Thomas

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Prosecutor Says Probe Of Fatal Missouri Police Shooting Needs To Take Its Course

Prosecutor Says Probe Of Fatal Missouri Police Shooting Needs To Take Its Course

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

FERGUSON, Mo. — Law enforcement officials on Wednesday asked for patience to allow the investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown to take its course as tension over the Missouri teenager’s death continued for a fifth straight day.

St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch said his office will take as much time as necessary to review circumstances that led a Ferguson police officer to fatally shoot the 18-year-old Brown on a street Saturday afternoon.

“The timeline on this is there is no timeline,” McCulloch told an afternoon news conference. “We will do this as expeditiously as possible. But we won’t rush.”

Resisting pressure from street demonstrators and public officials for answers that show why the unidentified officer confronted Brown and a companion shortly after noon on Saturday, McCulloch said the details may not emerge until the process of collecting evidence and presenting it to the grand jury is complete.

“I know that’s not the answer anybody wants to hear at this point,” he said. “Everybody wants to know what happened.”

McCulloch called the problem twofold. First, he said, ethical rules prevent prosecutors from disseminating the physical evidence. He also said he won’t do anything to corrupt the integrity of the investigation.

In response to a reporter’s question, McCulloch said it will certainly take more than two weeks to complete the investigation. He offered no specific estimate of the timetable. He cited a heavy volume of information that is being gathered in the case.

“We want to test the veracity and accuracy of anybody who comes to us,” McCulloch said.

McCulloch said a lot of information has come forward through social media, “some of it good, some of it bad.”

He stressed that the medical examiner’s report, 911 tapes, and other investigative material will be withheld at this point.

One new detail of Saturday’s shooting did emerge Wednesday when Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson in another news conference said the officer who shot Brown suffered facial injuries and was taken to a hospital.

Jackson also acknowledged that mending the strained relationship between his department and the African-American community is imperative for the city and region to move ahead following nearly a week of outrage, violence, and looting.

“We have always had real good relations with all of the neighborhood associations,” Jackson said. “Apparently, there’s been this undertow that now has bubbled to the surface, and it’s our first priority to address it, to fix what’s wrong.”

The first step, he added, is working with the community relations office on race relations that the U.S. Justice Department has dispatched to Ferguson.

The chief defended the racial makeup of the Ferguson department. Three of the agency’s 52 officers are African-American in a community where two-thirds of the population is black.

Jackson said he has worked to improve the diversity of the police department, adding it is a “constant struggle to hire and retain personnel.”

In the past few years, Jackson said, he has tried not only to recruit but improve quality of life in the department, including pay levels, to retain officers longer.

The comments from law enforcement in a week that has seen forums, prayer vigils, and a clergy-led parade Wednesday that passed many of the looted West Florissant Avenue businesses did little to quell the outrage spawned by Brown’s death.

As has been the case since Monday, the parking lot of a QuikTrip looted and burned Sunday evening has been the epicenter of hostility between protesters and police.

The animosity was for the most part verbal until a thrown bottle prompted police to fire smoke bombs at the crowd shortly before 9 p.m.

When police then ordered demonstrators to evacuate the area or face arrest the protesters responded that “we are not going anywhere.”

Police a short time later chased protesters into nearby neighborhoods after dispersing the crowd for the third straight night with tear gas grenades.

On Wednesday police also used piercing sound devices to scatter the crowd.

As they have since Saturday, demonstrators throughout the evening taunted and threatened police.

“If I’m going to go, I’m taking one of you with me,” warned one demonstrator.

Another shouted, “We’re not dogs, so what the hell you’ve got those whipping sticks for? Because you want to whip us like dogs.”

A county police tactical operations armored vehicle was deployed at the demonstration site for most of the night.

Protected by body armor, police sat atop the vehicle methodically fitting high-caliber automatic weapons into tripods, which were then trained on the crowd.

“You are being ordered to leave now!” police announced frequently through a public address system. “If you don’t leave peacefully there will be arrests.”

The crowd ignored the demand until the tear gas was fired.

As of mid-evening there were no reports of gunfire.

Prosecutors filed felony charges Wednesday against a man shot by police in a confrontation earlier in the day near the scene of the protests.

Esrail Britton, 19, was charged with second-degree assault on a law enforcement officer and armed criminal action. He remained hospitalized, and earlier in the day was reported to be in critical condition.

Officials said they have two addresses for Britton, both of them vacant dwellings in the St. Louis area.

The shooting occurred about 1 a.m. at West Florissant Avenue and Chambers Road, in unincorporated St. Louis County, as county police responded to a report of four of five men with masks and shotguns in an area where shots were heard.

Wesley Lowery, a reporter with The Washington Post, was arrested Wednesday evening along with Ryan Reilly of The Huffington Post, according to a Twitter post by Lowery.

He wrote that police came into the McDonald’s on West Florissant Road where the two were working, and tried “to kick everyone out.”

“Officers decided we weren’t leaving McDonald’s quickly enough, shouldn’t have been taping them,” he tweeted.

“Officers slammed me into a fountain soda machine because I was confused about which door they were asking me to walk out of,” he wrote.

He said that he was detained, booked, “given answers to no questions. Then just let out.”

Reilly tweeted that a SWAT team invaded the McDonald’s where he was working and recharging his phone, and asked for identification when he took a photo. They tried to kick everyone out, he wrote. He wrote that he was “assaulted” by an officer.

Photo: St. Louis Post-Dispatch/MCT/David Carson

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