Lezley McSpadden—the mother of Michael Brown—spoke to a crowd of about 50 activists gathered outside the St. Louis County Justice Center in Clayton on Sunday, Aug. 2. Along with her lawyer, Jerryl Christmas, McSpadden organized the gathering in response to County Prosecutor Wesley Bell’s July 30 announcement that he would not be bringing charges against Darren Wilson, the officer who fatally shot her 18-year-old son six years ago.
The protesters marched through Clayton for over an hour, stopping traffic at the intersection of Forsyth and the I-170 ramp for a four-and-a-half minute moment of silence to commemorate the four-and-a-half hours Mike Brown’s body lay in the street outside the Canfield Green Apartment Complex in 2014. Protesters chanted “Justice for Mike Brown is justice for all!” A leader also started a chant with “say his name,” to which some members of the crowd automatically answered “George Floyd” before correcting themselves to “Mike Brown.”
Both Christmas and McSpadden noted that Wesley Bell would not have been where he is today without support from St. Louis activists coming out of the Ferguson uprising.
“It’s not too long ago that the person we’re out here delivering a message to today would have been a part of…this same type of protest,” McSpadden said. “So we know he hasn’t forgot what it’s like to be a Black man in St. Louis. He woke up a prosecutor, but he still woke up a Black man. So he knows what it’s like to fight against a system that’s not friendly, or set up for people of color like Mike Brown.”
Bell was elected to the Ferguson City Council in 2015, after a campaign strongly supported by activists and then became County Prosecutor in 2018 on a platform of court reform. His predecessor, Bob McCulloch, also declined to press charges against Wilson. One of the points on which Bell ran his 2018 campaign for the County Prosecutor’s seat was that he would reopen the case and reconsider the evidence. Bell said that he conducted a five-month investigation of the reopened case before he came to his decision.
Christmas said that given his history, Bell’s announcement that he would not be charging Wilson was “disrespectful.”
“I think the decision recently announced by the Prosecutor’s Office continues to show the disrespect for Michael Brown’s life, and nobody has been brought to justice for his death. They keep denying due process to this family, and to this community. All we want is for the case to be charged, and taken to a jury, and let the jury decide.”
Before Bell made his announcement to the press, he met with McSpadden and Brown’s father, Michael Brown, privately to let them know of his decision. At the Clayton rally, McSpadden said that in that meeting Bell gave her reasons that he was not charging Wilson.
“One of them being that he just doesn’t want them to come after him like they’re coming after Kim,” McSpadden said, referring to St. Louis City Prosecuting Attorney Kim Gardner.
Bell told The American that he did not make the statement.
Gardner has reported being harassed and threatened after she brought charges against Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple accused of racially-motivated violence in July after emerging from their mansion and onto national television to wave guns at a group of protesters.
“Well, I wish Kim was the County Prosecutor,” McSpadden said. “Not to be offensive to any men out here, but sometimes, it takes a woman, you know.”
McSpadden said that in the private meeting Bell told her he had not yet found any new witnesses. Christmas asserted that the investigation was incomplete because it did not involve a search for new witnesses.
“He didn’t do any investigation…all he did was open up a box and have somebody else re-read the material,” he said. “There could be somebody out there who had additional information they wanted to share with him, but he didn’t give them that opportunity.”
Bell said he primarily used the 2015 Department of Justice investigation on the shooting of Brown, which is better organized than the trove of evidence previously released by McCulloch, 86 pages long, and includes the testimony of 148 witnesses.
“We relied heavily on the evidence uncovered by the Department of Justice, an investigation that was extraordinarily comprehensive and included interviews of every significant witness and its own forensic examinations,” Bell told The American.
“Because that investigation was run under the leadership of Eric Holder and the Civil Rights Division, we did not have the same concerns about bias or a rush to judgment. We also considered any other publicly available evidence that had emerged since the initial investigation was completed. And we hired an independent prosecutor to assess all of that evidence and conduct a considered, objective analysis.”
After the group marched about two miles around Clayton, McSpadden ended the rally with a call for Bell to change his decision and bring charges against Wilson.
“Wesley Bell can definitely do the right thing,” McSpadden said. “He can definitely bring charges, but he’s not willing to…he had a chance to do something that no other prosecutor in the county of St. Louis Missouri has ever done. But he failed us once again, the people who elected him, who believed in him. I can no longer believe in him.”
