Racially charged protests flared overnight in Ferguson, Missouri, in an eruption of fresh anger over the fatal Aug. 9 shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a police officer.
Tensions had temporarily cooled on Thursday night but by Friday evening, protesters were again swarming through a residential and retail district in the small town outside St. Louis that has become the site of repeated clashes between black residents and mostly white police forces.
Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, an African-American who was named by Governor Jay Nixon to lead security in the town on Thursday, said police fired a teargas canister at a crowd near a food and liquor store and broader violence and looting erupted. Some protesters threw bottles at riot gear-clad police who had ordered the crowd to disperse.
Tensions have been high since police officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown, 18, shortly after noon last Saturday as Brown and a friend walked down a street that runs through an apartment complex where Brown’s grandmother lives.
Emotions ramped up again Friday when authorities finally gave in to days of pressure and released the name of the officer who shot Brown, but did so only after first saying that Brown was a suspect in a store robbery at the time he was shot, a move that supporters of Brown’s family called a “smear” campaign.
Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson acknowledged in a news conference on Friday that Wilson did not know Brown was a suspect in the robbery and that the shooting resulted from the officer’s request for Brown to move out of the street. There was no connection between the shooting and the robbery, Jackson said.
Attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Brown’s family, said in a statement issued Friday that the family was “beyond outraged” at the police attempts to “assassinate the character of their son, following such a brutal assassination of his person in broad daylight.”
Civil rights activist the Reverend Al Sharpton said he would lead a rally with Brown’s family in Ferguson on Sunday.