FERGUSON, Mo. — In the end, it seems, it all came down to Officer Darren Wilson himself.
In
four hours of vivid testimony before the St. Louis County grand jury in
September describing his shooting of Michael Brown, the officer said
Mr. Brown, 18, had looked “like a demon” when he first approached him.
The
officer described himself as utterly terrified when, he said, Mr. Brown
reached into his police vehicle and fought him for his gun. Mr. Brown
was so physically overpowering that the officer, who is 6-foot-4, said
he “felt like a 5-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.”
The
officer’s testimony, along with thousands of pages of grand jury
documents, including contradictory witness accounts, appeared to have
helped convince some of the jurors that the officer had committed no
crime when he killed Mr. Brown.
The
St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, said he released the
documents to show people how thorough the grand jury inquiry had been
and to convince the public that justice had been done.
But
the failure to bring any charges against a white officer who shot an
unarmed black teenager in murky circumstances has set off a new storm of
protests and questions about the objectivity of the grand jury process.
In
an unusual step, Mr. McCulloch had said he would present all known
witnesses and evidence and instead of recommending an indictment, as is
usually the case, let the jurors decide for themselves what if any
charges to bring.
The
officer’s testimony, delivered without the cross-examination of a trial
in the earliest phase of the three-month inquiry, was the only direct
account of the fatal encounter. It appeared to form the spine of a
narrative that unfolded before the jurors over three months, buttressed,
the prosecutors said, by the most credible witnesses, forensic evidence
and three autopsies.
But
the gentle questioning of Officer Wilson revealed in the transcripts,
and the sharp challenges prosecutors made to witnesses whose accounts
seemed to contradict his narrative, has led some to question whether the
process was as objective as Mr. McCulloch claims.
Lawyers
for Mr. Brown’s family, who maintained all along that Officer Wilson
should be charged with a crime so he could be tried in public, said that
Monday’s decision and the voluminous transcripts only reinforced their
suspicions.
“This
grand jury decision we feel is a direct reflection of the sentiments of
those who presented the evidence,” Anthony Gray, a lawyer for the
relatives, said at a news conference Tuesday morning. “If you present
evidence to indict, you get an indictment. If you present evidence not
to indict, you don’t get an indictment.”
Officer
Wilson, in his testimony, described the encounter in terms that
dovetailed with a state law authorizing an officer’s use of deadly
force: He sought to show that he had reason to believe that Mr. Brown
posed a serious danger to himself or to others. He described Mr. Brown
as crazed and himself as fearing for his life, first in the police
vehicle and moments later in the street after he said he ordered the
fleeing Mr. Brown to halt and then shot him repeatedly, according to his
account, after Mr. Brown charged at him.
In
some cases the questions seemed designed to help Officer Wilson meet
the conditions for self-defense, with a prosecutor telling him at one
point: “You felt like your life was in jeopardy” followed by the
question, “And use of deadly force was justified at that point in your
opinion?”
But
when no one asked him why he had chased Mr. Brown, Officer Wilson
brought it up himself, saying that after experiencing Mr. Brown’s
aggression in the vehicle, he felt “he still posed a threat, not only to
me, but to anybody else that confronted him.”
Unusual Process
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.
Documents Released in the Ferguson Case
But
the grand jury in the Brown 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 releasing the transcripts of the proceedings
immediately after the session ended.
The
jurors met in a St. Louis County courthouse on 25 separate days. They
heard 70 hours of testimony from about 60 witnesses. And they confronted
a jumble of forensics reports, police radio logs, medical documents and
tapes of F.B.I. interviews with bystanders. Nine of the 12 jurors would
have had to agree in order to bring a criminal indictment; the actual
vote is secret.
After
three months of hearing evidence, the grand jury began its
deliberations last Friday at 3:04 p.m. They met again on Monday, and by
midday they were finished.
Though
the encounter between Officer Wilson and Mr. Brown lasted only a matter
of minutes, witness testimony revealed an array of variations, some
subtle and some flatly contradictory. Witness after witness took the
stand to describe the brief encounter and usually agreeing on the
broadest strokes: how it began with the struggle at the window of
Officer Wilson’s police S.U.V., then 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 said they first began to pay attention while the two were
wrestling at the S.U.V. window, though they usually said they could not
see enough to know what was going on. But even when the confrontation
broke out into the open — when Officer Wilson chased the teenager,
ordered him to halt, and then fired two volleys of five shots — the
accounts diverged.
“I see the officer running behind shooting,” one witness said.
“He did not take off running after Michael,” another said to the prosecutors.
Some
witnesses, whom Mr. McCulloch described as the most credible and
consistent, hewed more closely to Officer Wilson’s account.
“I
could say for sure he never put his hands up,” said a man who was
working in the area and did not live there, and whose testimony 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, highlighting the
contradictions in his various accounts.
Graphic: Q. and A.: What Happened in Ferguson?
“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.
Witnesses Challenged
Prosecutors
did not seem to shy from pointing out the discrepancies between
multiple interviews of a single witness, or at some points exploring the
criminal history of some witnesses, including Mr. Johnson, Mr. Brown’s
friend.
Though
the prosecutors did not press Officer Wilson and other law enforcement
officials about some contradictions in their testimony, they did
challenge other witnesses about why their accounts had varied.
Several
were asked if they felt any pressure to conform to a certain story
line, or if they felt fearful about their recollections differing from
the popular narrative in the streets. Some did acknowledge such fears
while others were shown to have delivered wholly unreliable accounts.
An
older man in a nearby housing complex dismissed the notion that Mr.
Brown had raised his hands to the sky, as some claimed, in a gesture
that became a symbol for the protest movement in Ferguson. But the man
was adamant that Mr. Brown had never charged at Officer Wilson, only
staggered toward him, 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 had once been shot
himself so he knew what it felt like. The prosecutor pointed out that
the distance Mr. Brown covered after turning was farther than the
witness remembered, and a juror questioned the witness as to whether he
could really judge how menacing Mr. Brown had 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 uncertainty about the moment when Mr. Brown stopped and turned
and what led Officer Wilson to start shooting. “That is something I
wrestle with to this day,” said a witness whose account lined up
particularly with Officer Wilson’s, though even it diverged on a couple
of crucial points, like whether the officer shouted commands for Mr.
Brown to stop fleeing.
Wealth of Evidence
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 one day, going as a group to examine a police
vehicle similar to Officer Wilson’s on another. On Nov. 11, the
prosecutors questioned a former superior of Officer Wilson’s from
another police force, asking about his relationship with the
African-American community as well as standard police practices
governing the use of deadly force (the witness had nothing but positive
things to say about Officer Wilson).
The
prosecutor said that forensic evidence, along with public and private
autopsy reports, supported the assertion that Officer Wilson and Mr.
Brown had struggled inside the police vehicle.
Timeline: Tracking the Events in the Wake of Michael Brown’s Shooting
A
crime scene investigator described swabbing Officer Wilson’s gun ; the
subsequent DNA report found Mr. Brown’s genetic material on Officer
Wilson’s Sig Sauer pistol. Similarly, DNA from Mr. Brown was also found
on the officer’s uniform pants and shirt.
In
his testimony, Officer Wilson told jurors that Mr. Brown had grabbed
his gun while the two scuffled at the vehicle. Feeling threatened,
Officer Wilson said, he fired the gun twice, once striking Mr. Brown in
the hand and leaving blood splattered inside the vehicle. Asked why he
did not use a Taser stun gun, the officer said he found them unwieldy and did not have one.
The
medical examiner who performed the initial autopsy showed the grand
jury close to 100 gruesome photos of the gunshot wounds from every
angle, giving exhaustive descriptions and lessons in the physics of such
wounds.
He
described the soot, or unburned gunpowder, on a graze wound on Mr.
Brown’s hand, proof that it was shot at a range of 6 to 9 inches.
Over
the months, the jurors seemed to focus intently on the final movement
that Mr. Brown may have made toward Officer Wilson, after a brief chase.
The prosecutor asked witness after witness if it seemed as if Mr. Brown
were reaching for a weapon, though few said they saw anything like
that. Mr. Brown was found to be unarmed.
Jurors
asked whether Mr. Brown, when he was said to be 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 after the first volley of bullets.
The
distance from the front wheel of the officer’s S.U.V. 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 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 (and dangerous)
after the initial gunshot wounds.
They
seemed intent on emphasizing this point, which supports Officer
Wilson’s description of Mr. Brown lunging toward him despite serious
wounds.
A final shot through the top of Mr. Brown’s head, the medical experts all agreed, felled him almost instantly.
After
the shooting, Officer Wilson was taken to a hospital, where a doctor
found that he had a “facial contusion,” the medical term for a bruise,
apparently from the struggle in the vehicle. He was given a prescription
for an anti-inflammatory drug.
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, told the jurors in summary. “And
I think you are going to make the right decision.”
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