Black teen shot by white officer didn’t rob store
Washington, March 12: New surveillance footage has emerged of the black teenager Michael Brown suggesting he had not in fact robbed a Ferguson, Missouri convenience store hours before he was shot by a white police officer.
Brown’s 2014 death sparked weeks of sometimes-violent protests, and ignited a national debate about race relations and law enforcement in the United States.
The new video, used in documentary “Stranger Fruit” that premiered Saturday at the South by Southwest film festival, suggests Brown’s altercation with store employees in a separate visit to the shop was tied to a suspected drug transaction with the shop employees.
In the video, dated around 1:15 am on August 9, 2014, Brown can be seen handing over the counter a small bag, which store employees then pass around and smell before a store clerk gives Brown two large boxes of
cigarillos.
Just before leaving the store, Brown returns to the counter and has the clerk hold the bag with the cigarillos behind the counter.
Ten and a half hours later, when Brown returns to the store, video surveillance footage previously released by police shows him standing behind the counter with his arms behind his back. He then reaches over the counter and grabs boxes of cigarillos. On his way out of the store, he shoves a clerk out of his way.
“Stranger Fruit” director Jason Pollock, who obtained the new footage, says it contradicts Ferguson police’s version of the events. In the film, he says Brown gave a small bag of marijuana to store employees and received cigarillos in exchange, and left the cigarillos behind the counter for safekeeping.
“There was an understanding, and that’s what you are going to see in that video,” Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden says in the documentary. “There was some type of exchange for one thing, for another.” Pollock concluded: “Mike did not rob the store.”
A lawyer representing the store and its employees disputed that account. “There was no transaction,” Jay Kanzler told The New York Times.