Darren Wilson, the Ferguson, Missouri, police officer who fatally shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown on August 9 and has remained in hiding ever since, has found a number of supporters. Some of them staged their own rally outside a St. Louis sports bar Sunday, where one of them seemed to express the sentiment of the crowd when she described the shooting of the teenager as “a good kill.”
The facts of the shooting that ended Michael Brown’s young life remain murky. Eyewitnesses tell similar stories of Wilson firing at Brown as he was running away, then firing again when the teenager turned around. But as usually occurs with multiple eyewitness accounts of any incident, the accounts conflict in some details.
But the Darren Wilson supporters at Sunday’s rally stated with certainty that despite not having a gun or weapon of any kind, Brown was the aggressor in the confrontation. The incident apparently began when Wilson approached Brown and a friend as they walked down the middle of the street.
The Wilson supporters said they believed that the officer’s actions were, therefore, justified.
“It was derailed with race. Michael Brown could have been white,” said Mary Kourik in a BuzzFeed account of the pro-Wilson protest . “It didn’t matter, Darren Wilson was doing his job.”
Another, Tina Morrison, insisted that the killing of Brown was “good.”
“We’ll all see this in the end that it was a good shooting,” Morrison told BuzzFeed reporter Jim Dalrymple. “You know, it was a good kill.”
There were approximately 60 people in attendance at the pro-Darren Wilson rally, which was also covered by CNN .
A recent New York Times survey found that while 57 percent of African-Americans believe that the shooting of Brown by Wilson was an unjustified use of deadly force, only 18 percent of whites feel the same way.
Of the 60 or so in attendance at the Sunday Darren Wilson rally, only two were not white.
According to a CNN account of the rally, a nearby resident, Victor Dewan, attempted to disperse the group, fearing that their presence might incite anger among other residents.
“We don’t want any controversy. There’s a lot of black people live around here and I want for the peace,” Dewan said.
The pro-Darren Wilson demonstrators responded by yelling at Dewan to “speak English!”
“I am speaking English do you understand that?! Stupid jackass, do you understand that?!” an angry Dewan responded , according to CNN .
An online fundraising effort has raised nearly $300,000 for Darren Wilson, though he has not been charged with any crime and is not reported to be experiencing financial distress.