Mike Brown, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed in the middle of the street by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson on a hot and hazy Saturday afternoon on August 9, 2014.
For over two months, people have practically begged the St. Louis County Police Department to release a detailed incident report of the shooting. Rather quietly, it was recently announced that the police will not be doing any such thing. In an interview with the Washington Post, Officer Brian Schellman, spokesman for the department, confirmed that that the police have no intention of releasing it whatsoever. Schellman said there are only two conditions in which the report will ever be released: If the grand jury in the Darren Wilson case decides against an indictment, or if Wilson is indicted and the report is used in court. Otherwise, we won’t be seeing it.
With this absence of information, the public has practically been forced to piece together public evidence to create a timeline of the day.
Below is a working theory of the killing of Mike Brown based on five things: six eyewitness accounts, confirmed audio of the fired gunshots, dozens of photos from the Aug. 9 shooting scene on Canfield Drive, visits to the crime scene by volunteers, and the publicly released autopsy results.
The typical police firearm usually holds 12-15 rounds (up to 17) to a magazine with possibly one bullet in the chamber, and Wilson may have nearly unloaded his entire gun during this incident.
Amazingly, a young man living in an apartment on Canfield Drive was using a mobile app called Glide in which he was recording a message to his girlfriend during the final moments of Brown’s life. The time stamp and location of the recording were authenticated by the technology company.
From the moment Mike Brown first saw Darren Wilson until he was laying face down, dead, on Canfield Drive, was less than two-and-half minutes. Jump below the fold for the timeline.
