Official autopsy shows Michael Brown had close-range wound to his hand, marijuana in system

[Travelman]

87. Who knows.

People get all sorts of mixed up with their own emotional BS that blinds them to the facts. God knows that happened here (and lots of other places) with Marissa Alexander: even though it is painfully obvious from the evidence that she clearly attempted to murder her sometimes-estranged boyfriend/live-in/whatever, people just howled that she was some victim of a tremendous injustice.

People who are caught up in that much emotional BS simply will not deal with or accept any actual facts.


What does this autopsy tell us? Not really a whole lot that we didn't already know. We knew long ago that Brown was shot in the front, not in the back, and that the evidence did not show Wilson "standing over Brown pumping lead into him as he lay in the street," so the people making those claims simply were not truthful in the least. We already had a pretty good idea that there was some sort of struggle in the police cruiser, both from the accounts of witnesses (and the third-hand accounts of what Wilson said had happened), and from the evidence that has been released (blood on the inside of the cruiser, etc.). We know that at some point, a distance opened up between Wilson and Brown, and that Brown was shot multiple times from that distance. During the course of those shots, the "kill shot" entered the top of Brown's skull, killing him instantly, though he was probably already on his way out anyway, since he had at least one round through a lung and another that had managed to go through his eye socket and bounce around in his skull.

None of this is new. None of this really changes anything. The nature of the confrontation in the cruiser and how it started is not really proven one way or another by this autopsy, though it does lend some credence to Wilson's purported version of events. Let's face facts here, people: the notion that a 5'8", 165-lb. cop is somehow going to manage to, or even try to, drag a 6'5", 300-lb. young man into the window of a car is pretty preposterous. But that does not automatically mean that Wilson did not somehow instigate the affair and the violence in that confrontation; it just means that the claim that Brown was being pulled into the cruiser is simply not credible, and frankly, it never was.


But regardless of all of that, what matters, what ACTUALLY MATTERS in this whole imbroglio is what happened between the moment that Michael Brown turned to flee after the second shot in the cruiser was fired and the moment that the "kill shot" went into his skull. That's a time span of probably five to seven seconds. It's what happened in those seconds that determine whether this was a justified shooting or not.

And this report does not tell us what happened in those seconds in the least. It tells us the result of what happened when the shots were fired, but it does not tell us what led up to those shots being fired.


I have said from the get-go on this that this appears to not be a "good" shooting. What's troubled me the most is the distance from the initial confrontation to where Brown fell. That was initially reported to be about 35 feet. That's a long way away for someone, even someone who is "charging" you, to be a threat. That's more than ten yards. Any running back in the NFL would be delighted if they could "charge" someone from more than ten yards away. Now, as more details have come out, I understand that the distance between them at the time of the shooting likely was considerably closer, probably more like ten to fifteen feet, but that's still a tough sell on me for this to be a justified shooting.

Now, of late, I've seen a few people around the internet claiming that the actual distance that Brown got from the cruiser was more like eighty feet. IF that's actually the case, if Brown truly got that far away, then that changes things quite a bit, because where he fell and died clearly was only about 30-35 feet from the police cruiser, and that is very clearly visible from the video taken at the scene immediately after the shooting. So IF Brown was actually 80 feet away, then that means that he, in fact, did run some distance away, then turned around, and ran back toward Wilson. And if that's the case, then I'm going to have to swallow it and accept that Wilson had a valid reason to fear for his safety when there's a guy who's already been in a physical confrontation with him now barreling at him at full steam.

BUT, I very strenuously caution that so far, I've seen no valid corroboration of this whole "eighty feet away" claim, so take all of that last paragraph not just with a grain of salt, but a whole can of Morton's.