Racial tensions in Missouri were stoked again on Tuesday when police killed another African American man as authorities struggled to quell the nightly confrontations over the shooting of an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson last week.
Angry residents of a black neighbourhood in St Louis, not far from Ferguson, accused the police of excessive force after two officers fired several bullets into a 23-year-old man described as carrying a knife and behaving erratically. The man has not yet been named but he was well known in the area and was said to have learning difficulties.
Sam Dotson, the chief of St Louis’s metropolitan police, said the man did not obey orders to drop a knife and was within four feet of the officers when they shot him. The dead man was later named locally as Kajieme Powell.
Authorities in Ferguson had earlier issued a plea for “night-time quiet and reconciliation” on Tuesday after another night of gunfire, teargas and chaos 10 days after the shooting of Brown in circumstances that remain disputed.
Jail records obtained by local media outlets revealed that 78 people were arrested in clashes with protesters on Sunday night and Monday morning, despite a massive show of force by riot police and newly arrived national guard units. Officials had earlier put the number of people detained at 31. A spokeswoman for St Louis County said on Tuesday that 57 had been booked at the county jail, and that more may have been detained elsewhere.
Brown’s parents, appearing on the Today show on NBC, said they believed the unrest would be alleviated if Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed their son was prosecuted. “Justice will bring peace I believe,” Lesley McSpadden, Brown’s mother, told the Today show’s Matt Lauer. “Him being arrested, charges being filed and a prosecution. Him being held accountable for what he did.”
A grand jury will likely begin hearing evidence from witnesses to the shooting. Ed Magee, a spokesman for the St Louis County prosecuting attorney, Bob McCulloch, who is overseeing the case, said his office would try to start presenting evidence on Wednesday during the regular once-a-week meeting date for the grand jury.
Wilson, who is represented by St Louis attorney Greg Kloeppel, has provided the St Louis County Police with an account of the controversial 9 August shooting, according to Magee.
Members of the grand jury will meet to determine if the evidence collected against Wilson warrants criminal charges. The process is not adversarial – attorneys for Wilson will not be allowed to join proceedings.
McCulloch’s impartiality has come under fire from some local politicians, including outgoing St Louis county executive Charlie Dooley. Dooley has called for McCulloch to be replaced by a special prosecutor, citing concerns in the black community.
Brown’s family announced that his funeral would be held on Monday, after federal authorities concluded a third autopsy on his body.
In Ferguson, leaders of the overwhelmingly white city administration urged peopled to stay at home to “allow peace to settle in” and pledged to reconnect with the predominantly black community. According to a statement, officials have been exploring how to increase the number of African American applicants to the law enforcement academy and raise funds for cameras that would be attached to patrol car dashboards and officers’ vests. “We plan to learn from this tragedy,” the leaders said in the statement.
The death of Brown has stoked 10 days of unrest in Ferguson and the surrounding area. The latest police killing took place a few miles away in a predominantly black neighbourhood.
Doris Davis, who saw the shooting from an upstairs window in her house, said she looked out when she heard the man shouting. “He said: No, no, no. Then they shot him from the front,” she told the Guardian. Davis, 66, said she saw two policemen open fire together and shoot several bullets each in rapid succession.
“I think it was excessive. People said he had a knife but if he had a knife they could have shot him in the foot. Or tasered him. They didn’t have to kill him,” she said. “I couldn’t believe my eyes, I have seen anything like that. I’ve never seen anyone get shot.”
Doton, the police chief, said witnesses could hear the man saying “Shoot me now, kill me now.”
Rauf Muhammad, a retired building contractor, who joined dozens of people protesting at the spot where the man was killed, said the victim had been attending the nightly protests against the killing of Brown in Ferguson. “Now it’s come to my neighbourhood,” he said. “People are fed up with getting this kind of treatment only because of the pigment of our skin. Do you think they would kill a white person like this? It could have been handled with a taser or a nightstick. They could have shot him in the leg. Crippled him. He’s going to fall.”
Dotson angered people further by saying: “I think officer safety is the number one issue.”
Several of the protestors angrily denounced that view. One young woman shouted: “Why are the lives of cops more important than anyone else?”
Dotson said the man has stolen two drinks from a convenience store and that the police responded to a 911 call. A view took hold among some of the people protesting outside the convenience store that the call was made by the owner. He denied it but would not discuss what happened further. But the mood was souring outside the shop, with some protestors making threats to destroy the property.
Davis’s daughter arrived to take her mother to another part of town, saying she feared there would be a violent reaction to the shooting.
“It’s very, very scary,” said Davis. “I’m afraid there’s going to be retaliation for this and I don’t know what people are going to do.”
Additional reporting by Chris Campbell in St Louis