FERGUSON, Mo. — Police said early Tuesday they came under “heavy gunfire” and made 31 arrests during another night of violence in this battle-scarred St. Louis suburb, where the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager at the hands of a white police officer has prompted a federal investigation.
At a news conference in the early morning hours, Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said that “our officers came under heavy gunfire” late Monday in a part of Ferguson but that police refrained from firing back. He said two people in the crowd were shot, but not by police, and were rushed to a hospital. Numerous fires were also set, he said.
Johnson said the two shooting victims were both men, but he had no information on their condition or identities. He stressed that “not a single bullet was fired by officers.”
Johnson also had harsh words for the news media, saying journalists have been failing to clear areas that police need to access. He also asked reporters not to “glamorize the acts of criminals.”
Hours before, unrest spread through the streets where 18-year-old Michael Brown was killed on Aug. 9. Standing in front of a table that displayed two handguns and a molotov cocktail, Johnson said the weapons had been seized from “criminals” who were hiding behind those peacefully protesting. He asked “good people” to protest during the day.
“All of these criminals at night that are masking themselves and hiding themselves behind peace, let them come at night so we can identify them, so we can take them away from our community and put them away and make our streets clear,” he said.
He spoke after the White House announced Monday that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. would travel to Ferguson to oversee the federal investigation of Brown’s death.
Holder’s visit was announced as Missouri National Guard troops arrived in Ferguson to back up local and state police.
On Ferguson’s main street, Monday evening began with peaceful protests. But the night soon turned tense, as a line of police officers, many in gas masks, faced off against hundreds of demonstrators. People threw bottles at officers. Shots were fired. Police launched smoke bombs and flares. And demonstrators threw them back.
The night was a crucial test for everybody in charge here, from local police commanders to Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon (D) — who had called out the National Guard — to President Obama himself. Obama’s decision to dispatch his attorney general was an admission that the teenager’s killing had become a symbol of something enormous: a test of the American justice system and the government’s ability to police the officers who police everyone else.
“It’s not over,” Ron Robinson, a major in the St. Louis city police, said as the sun was setting on Ferguson’s West Florissant Avenue. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better.”
Earlier in the day, authorities in Washington said Holder would arrive in Ferguson on Wednesday and meet with some of the FBI agents and prosecutors investigating the case. They have interviewed more than 200 people, scouring the area where Brown was shot by Darren Wilson, an officer with Ferguson’s police department.
Holder pledged “the full resources” of his department to investigate Brown’s death. In a conference call with civil rights groups, the attorney general said investigators are trying to determine whether there is enough evidence that Wilson used excessive force and deprived Brown of his civil rights to support a federal criminal prosecution.
“We are working tirelessly,” Holder said, according to people on the call.
In a statement, Holder criticized the way local police have released information. “The selective release of sensitive information that we have seen in this case so far is troubling to me,” he said. That appeared to be a reference to an earlier news conference in which police released video of Brown apparently stealing cigars from a convenience store on the day he died. Police later said that this incident was not related to the later shooting.
Also Monday, a St. Louis radio station reported that a woman had called to tell the officer’s side of the story. The station, KFTK, said the woman called herself Josie and said that the confrontation began when Wilson told Brown and a friend to stop walking in the street. The caller said Wilson then decided that the two fit the description of robbery suspects and sought to stop them.
The caller said the men fought near the car, then Brown went a distance away, turned and charged the officer. “He just started to come at him full speed,” the caller said. “And so he just started shooting, and he just kept coming. . . . The final shot was in the forehead, and he fell about two, three feet in front of the officer.”
CNN reported that this account seemed to match a version of events the officer gave to investigators.
Earlier Monday, Obama addressed the unrest in Ferguson in starkly emotional terms at the White House. While acknowledging that “there are young black men that commit crime,” the president lamented statistics showing that “you have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college.”
“As Americans, we’ve got to use this moment to seek out our shared humanity that’s been laid bare by this moment,” he said. “The potential of a young man and the sorrows of parents, the frustrations of a community, the ideals that we hold as one united American family.”
As he has before, Obama said that while most demonstrators are acting peacefully, “a small minority of individuals are not. While I understand the passions and the anger that arise over the death of Michael Brown, giving in to that anger by looting or carrying guns and even attacking the police only serves to raise tensions.”
Civil rights leaders said they were pleased by the administration’s escalating response, saying it was a step forward for Obama’s commitment to achieve racial justice. “Having the attorney general visit the site of an ongoing investigation is extra rare,” said NAACP PresidentCornell William Brooks, who has been in regular touch with the White House over the past week. He added that the “U.S. government’s pursuit of justice for this family is huge.”
One stark illustration that the Brown case has revealed doubts about the government’s ability to police the police: Three separate autopsies have now been conducted on the teenager’s body. One was done at the behest of St. Louis County, another by private pathologists at the behest of Brown’s family and a third by the U.S. military at the behest of Holder.
On Monday, the results of the county autopsy and the family autopsy were revealed.
The county’s review, released to state prosecutors late Friday, found that Brown had six gunshot wounds to the head and chest and was shot from the front, people familiar with the autopsy said. It also showed that Brown had marijuana in his system, they said.
Also Monday, two forensic pathologists hired by Brown’s family said their autopsy showed he was hit by at least six shots, one of which struck him at the top of the head and traveled downward through the brain. They said two wounds appeared to be “reentry” wounds.
A wound to Brown’s right arm could have occurred when he was putting his hands up, as witnesses have said, or when he was putting his arm across his body in a defensive manner, the pathologists said at a news conference. They said that there were no signs on Brown’s body of a struggle and that he did not appear to have been shot at close range because no gunshot residue was found on his body.
An attorney for the Brown family said the autopsy showed that the teenager was “trying to surrender” when he was shot, but the forensic pathologists — Michael Baden and Shawn Parcells — said they could not determine whether that was the case.
Baden, a former longtime medical examiner in New York City, said Brown could have survived all of his gunshot wounds except the one to the top of his head.
Brown’s family had asked the Justice Department to conduct an autopsy of his body, and federal officials were surprised to learn that the family had also turned to Baden for a private review of the remains, federal law enforcement officials said. The officials said they acted on the family’s request, not out of any concern about the adequacy of the state’s autopsy.
The federal government’s autopsy was conducted Monday. Its results have not yet been released.
In Ferguson, the governor canceled the city’s midnight-to-5 a.m. curfew after one chaotic day. The worst night yet had been Sunday, when protesters threw molotov cocktails at police and officers fired tear gas at the crowd before the curfew even took effect.
One volatile element in the crowd, informally called “the militants,” is made up of young men, some of whom have traveled to Ferguson from elsewhere — in some cases, hundreds of miles away. Their aim is to pursue confrontations with the police.
In Ferguson, Monday night began with a false calm. As of 9 p.m. local time, police were standing back, letting protesters move instead of forcing them into a concentrated pack. Some officers, borrowed from the city of St. Louis, handed out water. Somebody in the crowd gave out red roses in Brown’s honor. The crowd was full of white-collared clergy members.
“Elders,” called out Andrew Caldwell, 21, a parishioner from Williams Temple Church, who was walking the street. “It’s looking peaceful tonight.”
A few hours later, the street was full of police in riot gear, and the night was full of piercing sirens intended to disperse the crowd.
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