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| Brandon Lewis, right, says Michael Brown used his size to avoid confrontations. |
N.Y. TIMES
Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar.
At the same time, he regularly flashed a broad smile that endeared those around him. He overcame early struggles in school to graduate on time. He was pointed toward a trade college and a career and, his parents hoped, toward a successful life.
N.Y. TIMES
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| Officer Wilson’s childhood home in St. Peters, Mo. He has kept out of view since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. Credit Richard Perry/The New York Times |
The intense focus on Officer Darren Wilson’s actions marks a jarring change for a man who, over most of his 28 years, had left a muted, barely noticeable trail behind. While protesters have marched nightly, a grand jury has begun hearing evidence, and supporters of the officer have raised more than $350,000 for him. Officer Wilson himself has vanished from public view, leaving his ranch home where letters on red, white and blue stars hung from a door spell out “Welcome” in a town southwest of St. Louis; he is believed to be under police protection.
Officer Wilson, who is divorced, was born in Texas but has spent most of his years in these suburbs that surround St. Louis, records show. Family members, friends, colleagues and a lawyer have mostly refused to speak publicly about him, yet those who do paint a portrait of a well-mannered, relatively soft-spoken, even bland person who seemed, if anything, to seek out a low profile — perhaps, some suggested, a reaction to a turbulent youth in which his mother was repeatedly divorced, convicted of financial crimes and died of natural causes before he finished high school in 2004.
After attending the police academy, Officer Wilson began work in Jennings, another suburb, in June 2009. Robert Orr, the former chief of the Jennings Police Department, said he had no recollection of Officer Wilson and had to call the mayor last week to jog his memory. “Sure enough, the mayor said he was one of ours,” Mr. Orr said. “That must mean he never got in any trouble, because that’s when they usually came to me.”
Yet Officer Wilson’s formative experiences in policing came in a department that wrestled historically with issues of racial tension, mismanagement and turmoil. During Officer Wilson’s brief tenure, another officer was fired for a wrongful shooting, and a lieutenant was accused of stealing federal funds. In 2011, in the wake of federal and state investigations into the misuse of grant money, the department closed, and the city entered into a contract to be policed by the county. The department was found to have used grant money to pay overtime for D.W.I. checkpoints that never took place.
In October 2011, he went to Ferguson, where he now makes $45,302 a year.
There, Chief Thomas Jackson has reported no disciplinary actions against him. “He was a gentle, quiet man,” the chief said. “He was a distinguished officer.”