The Ferguson protest movement suddenly has a mystery on its hands, which could have been a murder mystery, given that it involves bullets leaving a .40 calibre handgun and piercing the face and shoulder of two unsuspecting victims. That the two yet-unnamed police officers who were shot just after midnight on March 12 outside the Ferguson Police Department were healthy enough to leave the hospital the next day is one mystery. Whether Jeffrey Williams, 20, who has been charged with five felonies in connection to the shootings, is actually the gunman is another. Officials say Williams confessed to shooting at someone else and accidently hitting the officers, though St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch said investigators aren’t “buying” that part of his story.
Williams’ attorney Jerryl Christmas said he doesn’t believe any part of Williams’ confession, which he said Williams has recanted because it was coerced after a beating by St. Louis County police officers. The County Police say there was no beating of the suspect. Arresting officers did not wear body cameras when they moved on Williams, so it is his word against the cops’. In the young man’s booking photo, he seems to have sustained some injuries that have not been explained. He certainly looks more damaged than Darren Wilson after Wilson’s scuffle with Michael Brown Jr. that left Wilson with no option to defend himself, Wilson claimed, than to shoot the unarmed teen six times, including twice in the head.
If Williams was the gunman, another mystery remains. Who was he shooting at, and why? Whether coerced or not, Williams did not confess to intentionally shooting the police officers. Officials said he claimed he was attempting to settle a personal dispute and simply misfired. Eyewitness Heather De Mian, who captured the police officers being shot on her livestream (but not the shooter), said people were crossing Tiffin Avenue in the moments before shots rang out from the hill that runs up Tiffin, away from the police department. So the person closest to the action who has come forth publicly finds it plausible that the shooter’s intended victim was not a police officer.
Further, we must recognize a very tragic fact. It is statistically not improbable for a young black man in the St. Louis region to attempt to kill another young black man (admittedly, this is making an assumption about the intended victim on March 12, if it was not a cop) and accidentally shoot someone else. The evening before the police shootings, a 6-year-old black boy was killed just a few miles east on West Florissant Avenue when someone opened fire at his father. Like the Tiffin Avenue shooter, this gunman was in a moving vehicle and sped off into the night. No manhunt was declared for the gunman who killed the black boy, unlike the gunman who wounded the police officers, and if the victim’s family knows who fired on them, they are not saying.
We do know one thing for sure in this tangle of mysteries. St. Louis County criminal justice officials ruined a golden opportunity to bring a measure of unity to a volatile situation. St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said at a press conference on Friday that the “protest community” – that phrase in itself was amazing, coming from the chief who oversaw the first tear-gassing in Ferguson – cooperated with the criminal investigation into the March 12 shootings. Indeed, protestors had every reason to cooperate, because the civilians left on the scene after midnight were just as vulnerable as the police officers – arguably, more vulnerable, since the bullets had to get past protestors to strike the cops. Yet the day before, in his first public comments, Belmar said he suspected the shooter was “embedded” with the protestors, without proof, and the day after, when announcing the charges against Williams, McCulloch said he didn’t think it was a “coincidence” that the shooting happened after a protest.
In making those two wolf whistles at the expense of the protest community, Belmar and McCulloch squandered any good will left over from the criminal investigation, where protestors and police worked together to investigate a shooting that endangered them all. As a result, the protest community feels smeared by authorities – rightly so – and we are right back to where we began, in a standoff characterized by mutual distrust and hostility. Until Belmar and McCulloch accept that protestors have a right to criticize law enforcement without being regarded as public enemies even when cooperating with police on a criminal investigation into the shooting of police, there will be no peace, no healing, in Ferguson or St. Louis.
