FERGUSON’S FORGOTTEN VICTIM
Few leads in DeAndre Joshua killing
Along a short stretch of winding road through a nondescript apartment complex, two memorials of stuffed animals mark the spots where young men died. The sites are separated by roughly 300 metres, but in a sense are worlds apart.
One is for Michael Brown, whose fatal shooting by a Ferguson police officer ignited months of protests and unrest and started a national conversation about race and law enforcement tactics.
The other is for DeAndre Joshua, a young black man found shot to death and set on fire on Nov. 25, the morning after a grand jury decided not to indict Darren Wilson in Brown’s death and Ferguson erupted in another round of violence. Outside his circle of family and friends, Joshua’s name is mostly unknown.
There have been no arrests. Police have few leads. And while 40 people claimed to have seen some aspect of the confrontation that led to Brown’s death, police have turned up not a single co-operating eyewitness to Joshua’s slaying.
The U.S. Justice Department would find that Wilson was justified in shooting Brown.
But in another report, it determined that minorities in Ferguson are disproportionately stopped and searched, fined for petty offences and subject to excessive police force.
If blacks have reason to distrust police, that distrust also makes it harder for police to investigate crimes — especially in Ferguson, especially over the past eight months.
“If it was me, if I knew something like that, it would eat my brain up not to tell,” said his mother, Maria Joshua, in an interview at her home. “Because if you don’t, they are going to do it to someone else. And just put yourself in my shoes. What if it was your family member?”
Joshua was 20 years old, an aspiring rapper and overnight stocker at Walmart. Known to his buddies as “Twin,” and described by friends and relatives as playful and quick to smile, he graduated from Jennings Senior High School, and lived at the time of his death with his mother and siblings in University City, about a 20-minute drive south from Ferguson. He spent his last day hanging out with relatives at his aunt’s house in Ferguson, where he often stayed to be closer to his job.
According to interviews with relatives and friends, he spent the afternoon and evening visiting with his cousins at his aunt’s house, watching the violence unfold on the TV news. Joshua sent a private message to his girlfriend, Georgia Young, saying he needed to pick up a coat from her apartment in the Canfield Green complex, steps from where Brown had been killed. Sometime that evening — it’s not entirely clear when, but it was at least a couple of hours after he had sent the message — Young said Joshua showed up at her apartment.
Joshua was in and out of the apartment, Young said. At one point, well after midnight, he returned to the house of his aunt, Monique Joshua, to pick up an iPad he said he had been trying to sell. He had left her house earlier with two iPads, before returning for the third, his aunt said.
The last time he returned to Georgia Young’s apartment, she says he stayed for about a half-hour before slipping out of his pants and into bed. Five minutes later, sometime around 2 a.m., Joshua suddenly got out of bed, grabbed three iPads and his pistol, and departed, without saying where he was going. Young said it wasn’t unusual for him to have a weapon, because in that neighbourhood, “everybody carries a gun.”
After leaving Young’s apartment, Joshua showed up at another apartment in Canfield Green and knocked on the door of a friend, Sabrina Webb — a cousin of Michael Brown’s. It was between 2:30 and 3 a.m., Webb said. She said Joshua banged on the door so hard that it startled her. A tall, thin black man with “a low haircut,” someone she did not know, stood off to the side. Webb asked Joshua who the stranger was, and the man quickly responded, “I’m his cousin.”
“DeAndre looked up at him like it wasn’t his cousin, but like he didn’t want to disagree with him, like he was afraid,” Webb recalled.
Webb said Joshua turned around and trotted down the stairs, the unknown man following him.
About an hour after sunrise the next morning, Joshua’s corpse was found in the driver’s seat of his white 2004 Pontiac Grand Prix. He had been shot once in the left side of his head, and had been set on fire with some sort of accelerant that left burns on his arm, fingers and legs. Based on the body’s condition, police say they believe he had been dead for several hours.
There is a lot of suspicion in this neighbourhood, and few answers. An Associated Press reporter attempted to interview more than a dozen residents who live in the immediate vicinity of where Joshua’s body was found, but most declined.
The same day Associated Press interviewed Young and others at Canfield Green and Northwinds Apartments, the neighbouring complex where his body was found, someone threw a sparkplug through the living room window of Maria Joshua’s home in a nearby city. Whether or not the incident was related to her son’s death, it frightened her.
She said the description of the man given by Webb does not resemble any of her son’s cousins.
She said police haven’t told her much — they say they do not want to compromise their investigation. They have yet to talk to Joshua’s friend, Webb.
Teresa Williams, who lives in an apartment adjoining the parking lot where the body was found, told the Associated Press she saw the car that morning through her window and was disturbed to learn that a man had died. She said police interviewed her that day, and she told them she heard gunshots all night long, but wasn’t sure when the one that killed Joshua was fired.