Let us return to Wilson’s testimony before the St. Louis County Grand Jury—the testimony in which he described his fear in the face of someone who “looks like a demon.” When Wilson finally fired off shots, Brown ran away. Wilson pursued, firing more rounds. Brown stopped and turned around, and, then according to Wilson, began “bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”
Wilson thus “had to kill him,” he said, to neutralize that aggressive, demonic force. So he shot Brown six times, twice in the head. And only after a bullet entered Brown’s head did Wilson feel he had regained control. Wilson said, “And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean, I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped.” Wilson’s demon was dead.
Clearly, Wilson didn’t like what he felt as he wrestled with “Hulk Hogan”: powerless and afraid. And clearly his mind turned Brown into a demon. Wilson thus killed a young man he thought of as a demon that could not be wounded, handcuffed, and carted off to jail, but must instead be slayed. This is a self-incriminating statement, evidence that could have been used to indict Wilson for unjustifiable manslaughter. But it wasn’t.
Now consider the public statement of Daniel Pantaleo, the Staten Island Police Officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner, an unarmed black man suspected of peddling cigarettes last summer. Pantaleo, like Wilson, said he was afraid. The New York Times quoted him as saying he feared they would crash through a plate glass storefront as they tumbled to the ground. Although the attack on this black man was recorded on the smartphones of eyewitnesses, as were his asthmatic cries of “I can’t breathe,” the police officer was not indicted. His fear, apparently, was deemed reasonable, along with his killer grip.
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