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| A makeshift memorial for Michael Brown on the spot on a Ferguson, Mo., street where his body lay for about four hours after he was shot by a police officer on Aug. 9. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images |
N.Y. TIMES
Just after noon on Saturday, Aug. 9, Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer on Canfield Drive.
For about four hours, in the unrelenting summer sun, his body remained where he fell.
Neighbors were horrified by the gruesome scene: Mr. Brown, 18, face down in the middle of the street, blood streaming from his head. They ushered their children into rooms that faced away from Canfield Drive. They called friends and local news stations to tell them what had happened. They posted on Twitter and Facebook and recorded shaky cellphone videos that would soon make their way to the national news.
Mr. Brown probably could not have been revived, and the time that his body lay in the street may ultimately have no bearing on the investigations into whether the shooting was justified. But local officials say that the image of Mr. Brown’s corpse in the open set the scene for what would become a combustible worldwide story of police tactics and race in America, and left some of the officials asking why.
“The delay helped fuel the outrage,” said Patricia Bynes, a committeewoman in Ferguson. “It was very disrespectful to the community and the people who live there. It also sent the message from law enforcement that ‘we can do this to you any day, any time, in broad daylight, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ ”
The St. Louis County Police Department, which almost immediately took over the investigation, had officers on the scene quickly, but its homicide detectives were not called until about 40 minutes after the shooting, according to county police logs, and they arrived around 1:30 p.m. It was another hour before an investigator from the medical examiner’s office arrived.
And officials were contending with what they described as “sheer chaos” on Canfield Drive, where bystanders, including at least one of Mr. Brown’s relatives, frequently stepped inside the yellow tape, hindering investigators. Gunshots were heard at the scene, further disrupting the officers’ work.
“Usually they go straight to their jobs,” Officer Brian Schellman, a county police spokesman, said of the detectives who process crime scenes for evidence. “They couldn’t do that right away because there weren’t enough police there to quiet the situation.”
For part of the time, Mr. Brown’s body lay in the open, allowing people to record it on their cellphones. A white sheet was draped over Mr. Brown’s body, but his feet remained exposed and blood could still be seen. The police later shielded the body with a low, six-panel orange partition typically used for car crashes.
Experts in policing said there was no standard for how long a body should remain at a scene, but they expressed surprise at how Mr. Brown’s body had been allowed to remain in public view.
It was typical, given the limited resources of the Ferguson Police Department, to transfer a homicide investigation to the St. Louis County police, a much larger force with more specialized officers.
According to police logs, the county police received a report of the shooting at 12:07, and their officers began arriving around 12:15. Videos taken by bystanders show that in the first minutes after Mr. Brown’s death, officers quickly secured the area with yellow tape. In one video, several police cars were on the scene, and officers were standing close to their cars, a distance away from Mr. Brown’s body.
Around 12:10, a paramedic who happened to be nearby on another call approached Mr. Brown’s body, checked for a pulse, and observed the blood and “injuries incompatible with life,” said his supervisor, Chris Cebollero, the chief of emergency medical services at Christian Hospital. He estimated that it had been around 12:15 when a sheet was retrieved from an ambulance and used to cover Mr. Brown.
Relatives of Mr. Brown said they were at the scene quickly after hearing of the shooting from a family friend, who had been driving in the area and recognized the teenager’s body. They said they begged for information but received nothing.
Louis Head, Mr. Brown’s stepfather, said the police had prevented him from approaching the body. “Nobody came to nobody and said, ‘Hey, we’re sorry,’ ” he said. “Nobody said nothing.”
It was not until 12:43 p.m. that detectives from the county police force were notified of the shooting, according to county police records. Officer Schellman, the county police spokesman, said Friday that Chief Belmar did not recall exactly when he had received the call from his counterpart in Ferguson. But, Officer Schellman said, Chief Belmar reported that as soon as he hung up, he immediately called the chief of detectives.
Asked to describe procedures in New York, Gerald Nelson, a chief who commands the patrol forces in much of Brooklyn, said that as soon as emergency medical workers have concluded that a victim is dead, “that body is immediately covered.”
“We make sure we give that body the dignity it deserves,” Chief Nelson said.
St. Louis County police officials acknowledged that they were uncomfortable with the time it took to shield Mr. Brown’s body and have it removed, and that they were mindful of the shocked reaction from residents. But they also defended their work, saying that the time that elapsed in getting detectives to the scene was not out of the ordinary, and that conditions made it unusually difficult to do all that they needed.
“Michael Brown had one more voice after that shooting, and his voice was the detectives’ being able to do a comprehensive job,” said Jon Belmar, chief of the St. Louis County Police Department.
Francis G. Slay, the mayor of St. Louis, whose city did not have a role in the shooting or the investigation, said in an interview that his city had a “very specific policy” for handling such situations.“About 80 percent of the time, the body is generally taken away immediately,” he said, and if the body remains at the scene, “we’ll block off the area.”
He continued: “We’ll cover the body appropriately with screening or tents, so it’s not exposed to the public. We do the investigation as quickly as we can.”
Dr. Michael M. Baden, the former New York City chief medical examiner who was hired by the Brown family’s lawyers to do an autopsy, said it was “a mistake” to let the body remain in the street for so long.
“In my opinion, it’s not necessary to leave a body in a public place for that many hours, particularly given the temperature and the fact that people are around,” he said. “There is no forensic reason for doing that.”
The St. Louis County police declined to give details about what evidence investigators had been gathering while Mr. Brown’s body was in the street.
Typically, said John Paolucci, a former detective sergeant at the New York Police Department, crime scene investigators would work methodically.
If there had been a struggle between an officer and a shooting victim, the officer’s shirt would be taken as evidence. The police cruiser would be towed to a garage and examined there.
Detectives would want to find any shell casings, said Mr. Paolucci, who retired in 2012 as the commanding officer of the unit that served as liaison between the detective bureau and the medical examiner’s office.
Usually, the police conduct very little examination of the body at the scene, other than photographing it, he said.
“We might use vehicles to block the body from public view depending on where cameras are and how offensive the scene is, if something like that is starting to raise tensions,” Mr. Paolucci said.
Chief Belmar said that while he was unable to explain why officers had waited to cover Mr. Brown’s body, he said he thought they would have done so sooner if they could have.
As the crowd on Canfield Drive grew, the police, including officers from St. Louis County and Ferguson, tried to restore order. At one point, they called in a Code 1000, an urgent summons to nearby police officers to help bring order to a scene, police officials said.
Even homicide detectives, who do not ordinarily handle such tasks, “were trying to get the scene under control,” said Officer Rick Eckhard, another spokesman for the St. Louis County police.
Sometime around 4 p.m., Mr. Brown’s body, covered in a blue tarp and loaded into a dark vehicle, was transported to the morgue in Berkeley, Mo., about six miles from Canfield Drive, a roughly 15-minute drive.
Mr. Brown’s body was checked into the morgue at 4:37 p.m., more than four and a half hours after he was shot