The physical evidence in the Michael Brown case supported the officer

In the wake of the Michael Brown grand jury decision, several blog posts (including one by me Wednesday) have dissected Officer Darren Wilson’s testimony. Read by itself, different people can draw differing conclusions about whether it is accurate or not. But what hasn’t been widely discussed is whether the physical evidence confirms or contradicts his story.

Perhaps the reason for this disinterest in the ballistics report, autopsies and other similar information is that for at least some of Brown’s supporters the facts are, apparently, largely irrelevant because Brown is a metaphorical “symbol” of injustice regardless of what actually happened. A related reason may be that working through this information is time-consuming — and thus beyond the capacity of many commentators. In contrast, the grand jury painstakingly heard sworn testimony from more than 60 witnesses, which is now collected in several thousand pages of transcripts. Reviewing these transcripts reveals some important and essentially indisputable facts. And those facts confirm many critical aspects of Wilson’s account.

The Washington Post has this extremely helpful graphical presentation of what happened during the shooting, with links to some of the physical evidence in the case. What follows is my discussion of what appears to be some of the most significant. To be clear, I do not purport here to completely describe all the forensic evidence and related testimony. But I will commit to carefully reviewing all of the comments to this post and if anyone points to a significant omission in what I’m describing about the physical evidence — and provides a citation to the volume and page number of the grand jury testimony for that omission — I’ll be glad to consider adding discussion of it....

For your reference, Officer Darren Wilson’s Grand Jury testimony:

When I look at Brown, the first thing I notice is in his right hand, his hand is full of Cigarillos. And that’s when it clicked for me because now I saw the Cigarillos, I looked in my mirror, I did a double check that Johnson was wearing a black shirt, these are the two from the stealing.

And they kept walking, as I said, they never stopped, never got on the sidewalk, they stayed in the middle of the road.

So I get on the radio and Frank 21 is my call sign for the day, I said “Frank 21 I’m on Canfield with two, send me another car.”

I then put my car in reverse and backed up and backed up just past them and then angled my vehicle to kind of cut them off kind of to keep them somewhat contained.

As I did that, I go to open the door and I say, “Hey. come here for a minute.” to Brown. As I open the door he turns, faces me, looks at me and says, “What the f*** are you going to do about it?” and shuts my door, slammed it shut. I haven’t even got it open enough to get my leg out, it was only a few inches.

I then looked at him and told him to get back and he was just staring at me, almost like to intimidate me or overpower me.

I then opened the door again and used the door to push him backwards, and while I’m doing that I tell him to, “get the f*** back, and then I use my door to push him.

He then grabs my door again and shuts my door. At that time is when I saw him coming into my vehicle. His head was higher than the top of my car. And I see him ducking and as he is ducking, his hands are up and he is coming in my vehicle.

I had shielded myself in this type of manner and kind of looked away, so I don’t remember seeing him come at me, but I was hit right in the side of the face with a fist. I don’t think it was a full-on swing, I think it was a full-on swing, but not a full shot. I think my arm deflected some of it, but there was still a significant amount of contact that was made to my face.

After he hit me then, it stopped for a second. He kind of like grabbed and pulled, then it stopped. When I looked up, if this is my car door, I’m sitting here facing that way, he’s here. He turns like this and and now the Cigarillos I see in his left hand. He is going like this and he says, “Hey man, hold these.” And at that point I tried to hold his right arm because it was like this at my car. This is my car window. I tried to hold his right arm and use my left hand to get out to have some type of control and not be trapped in my car any more. And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan. That’s how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping is arm.

And as I am trying to open the door is when, and I can’t really get it open because he is standing maybe only 6 inches from my door, but as I was trying to pull the handle, I see his hand coming back around like this and he hit me with this part of his right here, just a full swing all the way back around and hit me right here. After he did that, the next thing I remember is how do I get this guy away from me. What do I do not to get beaten inside my car.

I remember having my hands up and I thought to myself, you know, what do I do.

I considered using my mace, however, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my left hand, which is blocking my face to go for it. I couldn’t reach around my right to get it and if I would have gotten it out, the chances of it being effective were slim to none. His hands were in front of his face, it would have blocked the mace from hitting him in the face and if any of that got on me, I know what it does to me and I would have been out of the game. I wear contacts and if that touches any part of my eyes, then I can’t see at all.

Like I said, I don’t carry a taser, I considered my asp, but to get that out since I kind of sit on it, I usually have to lean forward and pull myself forward to the steering wheel to get it out. Again, I wasn’t willing to let go of the one defense I had against being hit. The whole time I can’t tell you if he was swinging at me or grabbing me or pushing me or what, but there was stuff going on and I was looking down figuring out what to do.

Also, when I was grabbing my asp, I knew if I did even get it out, I’m not going to be able to expand it inside the car or I am going to be able to make a swing that will be effective in any manner.

Next I considered my flashlight. I keep that on the passenger side of the car. I wasn’t going to, again, reach over like this to grab it and then if I did grab it, would it even be effective. We are so close and confined.

So the only other option I thought I had was my gun. I drew my gun, I turned. It is kind of hard to describe it, I turn and go like this. He is standing here. I said, “Get back or I’m going to shoot you.”

I felt that another one of those punches in my face could knock me out or worse. I mean it was, he’s obviously bigger than I was and stronger, I’ve already taken two to the face I didn’t think I would, the third one could be fatal if he hit me right.

He grabs my gun, says, “You are too much of a pussy to shoot me.” He grabbed with his hand over the top like this manner and then twisted it down like this. And when it twisted it ended up being like this in my hip. The gun goes down into my hip and at that point I thought I was getting shot. I can feel his fingers try to get inside the trigger guard with my finger and I distinctly remember envisioning a bullet going into my leg. I thought that was the next step.

Like I said, I was just so focused on getting the gun out of me. When I did get it up to this point, he is still holding onto it and I pulled the trigger and nothing happens, it just clicked. I pull it again, it just clicked again.

At this point I’m like why isn’t this working, this guy is going to kill me if he gets a hold of this gun. I pulled it a third time, it goes off. When it went off, it shot through my door panel and my window was down and glass flew out of my door panel. I think that kind of startled him and me at the same time.

The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked. He comes back towards me again with his hands up.

When I look up after that, I see him start to run and I see a cloud of dust behind him. I then get out of my car. As I’m getting out of the car I tell dispatch, “shots fired, send me more cars.”

We start running, kind of the same direction that Johnson had pointed. Across the street like a diagonal towards this, kind of like where the parking lot came in for Copper Creek Court and Canfield, right at that intersection. And there is a light pole right there, I remember him running towards the light pole.

So when he stopped, I stopped. And then he starts to turn around, I tell him to get on the ground, get on the ground.

He turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back towards me. His first step is coming towards me, he kind of does like a stutter step to start running. When he does that, his left hand goes in a fist and goes to his side, his right one goes under his shirt in his waistband and he starts running at me.

At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him.

And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.

And when he gets about that 8 to 10 feet away, I look down, I remember looking at my sites and firing, all I see is his head and that’s what I shot.

I don’t know how many, I know at least once because I saw the last one go into him. And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped.

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