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| A protester is arrested outside of the St. Louis city hall Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2014, in St. Louis. Missouri's governor ordered hundreds more state militia into Ferguson on Tuesday, after a night of protests and rioting over a grand jury's decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a case that has inflamed racial tensions in the U.S. |
FERGUSON, Mo.
(AP) -- Some witnesses said Michael Brown had been shot in the back.
Another said he was lying face-down when Officer Darren Wilson finished
him off. Still others acknowledged changing their stories to fit
published details about the autopsy, or admitted that they didn't see
the shooting at all.
An Associated Press
review of thousands of pages of grand jury documents reveals numerous
examples of statements made during the shooting investigation that were
inconsistent, fabricated or provably wrong. For one, the autopsies
ultimately showed Brown wasn't struck by any bullets in his back.
Prosecutors
exposed these inconsistencies before the jurors, which likely
influenced their decision not to indict Wilson in Brown's death.
Bob
McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecutor, said the grand jury had to
weigh testimony that conflicted with physical evidence and conflicting
statements by witnesses as it decided whether Wilson should face
charges.
"Many witnesses to the shooting of
Michael Brown made statements inconsistent with other statements they
made and also conflicting with the physical evidence. Some were
completely refuted by the physical evidence," McCulloch said.
The
decision Monday not to charge Wilson with any crime set off more
violent protests in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson and around the
country, fueled by claims that the unarmed black 18-year-old was shot
while peacefully surrendering to the white officer in the mostly
African-American city.
What people thought
were facts about the Aug. 9 shooting have become intertwined with what
many see as abuses of power and racial inequality in America.
And
media coverage of this aftermath made it into the grand jury
proceedings. Before some witnesses testified, prosecutors showed jurors
clips of the same people making statements on TV.
Their
inconsistencies began almost immediately after the shooting, from
people in the neighborhood, the friend walking with Brown during the
encounter and even one woman who authorities suggested probably wasn't
even at the scene at the time.
Jurors also
were presented with dueling versions from Wilson and Dorian Johnson, who
was walking with Brown during the Aug. 9 confrontation. Johnson painted
Wilson as provoking the violence, while Wilson said Brown was the
aggressor.
But Johnson also declared on TV, in
a clip played for the grand jury, that Wilson fired at least one shot
at his friend while Brown was running away: "It struck my friend in the
back."
Johnson held to a variation of this
description in his grand jury testimony, saying the shot caused Brown's
body to "do like a jerking movement, not to where it looked like he got
hit in his back, but I knew, it maybe could have grazed him, but he
definitely made a jerking movement."
Other eyewitness accounts also were clearly wrong.
One
woman, who said she was smoking a cigarette with a friend nearby,
claimed she saw a second police officer in the passenger seat of
Wilson's vehicle. When quizzed by a prosecutor, she elaborated: The
officer was white, "middle age or young" and in uniform. She said she
was positive there was a second officer - even though there was not.
Another
woman testified that she saw Brown leaning through the officer's window
"from his navel up," with his hand moving up and down, as if he were
punching the officer. But when the same witness returned to testify
again on another day, she said she suffers from mental disorder, has
racist views and that she has trouble distinguishing the truth from
things she had read online. Prosecutors suggested the woman had
fabricated the entire incident, and wasn't even at the scene the day of
the shooting.
Another witness had told the FBI
after the shooting that he saw Wilson shoot Brown in the back, and then
stand over his prone body to finish him off. But in his grand jury
testimony, this witness, acknowledged that he had not seen that part of
the shooting, and that what he told the FBI was "based on me being where
I'm from and that can be the only assumption that I have."
The
witness, who lives in the predominantly black neighborhood where Brown
was killed, also acknowledged that he changed his story to fit details
of the autopsy that he had learned about on TV.
"So
it was after you learned that the things you said you saw couldn't have
happened that way, then you changed your story about what you seen?" a
prosecutor asserted.
"Yeah, to coincide with what really happened," the witness replied.
Another
man, describing himself as a friend of Brown's, told a federal
investigator that he heard the first gunshot, looked out his window and
saw an officer with a gun drawn and Brown "on his knees with his hands
in the air." He added: "I seen him shoot him in the head."
But
when later pressed by the investigator, the friend said he hadn't seen
the actual shooting because he was walking down the stairs at the time,
and instead had heard details from someone in the apartment complex.
"What you are saying you saw isn't forensically possible based on the evidence," the investigator told the friend.
Shortly after that, the friend asked if he could leave.
"I ain't feeling comfortable," he said.
