Thanks. I did the math and it looks like the distance between the furthest splatter (evidence tag 20) and Brown’s right foot is 21 feet, 8 inches. Here’s the relevant picture:
To clarify for others, this is the minimum distance that he must have covered after he decided to stop running. Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell us whether he was charging, running, walking with his hands up, or stumbling because he’d just been shot in the chest. But we do know that he moved nearly 22 feet towards Officer Wilson before he died.
Wilson does not have them 150 feet from his car, for one.
Again, that does not prove he was lying. He could be lying (and there are some things about his testimony that seem… well, dubious, even coached) but he also could simply be misremembering what happened. Only in movies do eyewitnesses have a perfect account of the things they saw; indeed, as anyone should know, eyewitness testimony is fantastically inconsistent.
Yeah, the strange thing is that nobody puts them 150 feet from the car. Everyone says it was 5-15 steps, Wilson says like 20-30 feet initially. I don’t recall a single witness testimony that accurately pegged either the distance (or the number of shots for that matter), and there’s lots of witness who state some sort of distance.
Another crime scene detective, this one tasked with photographing Darren Wilson at the hospital and inspecting his service weapon.
The decision was made to swab the gun for DNA instead of taking fingerprints. Can’t do both (page 44).
If I’m reading the forensic pathologist’s testimoney correctly, there was a serious but non-fatal shot through a lung, and then two shots to the top of the head, one that was non-fatal through the eye area, and then a fatal shot to the top of the head. This, we already knew.
No discussion of clothes shifting, by which I mean if someone has their hands up their shirt would lift and the hole in the shirt wouldn’t line up with the entrance wound. The pathologist simply noted that there were defects (holes) in the shirt and then removed it.
Thanks a lot to the OP for going through this. I downloaded the report myself but it’s thousands of pages, and I gave up before really starting.
One thing that’s striking is how wildly inconsistent various witness statements are with each other and with other forms of evidence. One unfortunate aspect of it is that it kind of leaves everyone with something to hold on to. Any person predisposed to one side or another can select the evidence that supports their side and focus on that.
FWIW, he confirms that Mike handed him the “rillos” but doesn’t say if words were exchanged… just that he put his hands “like, grab these, Bro.”
I gotta say, he makes a pretty good witness. I think we all know his story, it’s not the most Brown-positive spin of all the witnesses but it’s pretty close. Wilson initiated the conflict and Brown simply tried to get away. Brown was shot through the door, then they ran and Wilson followed. Wilson fired at Brown as he was running, and it looked like he was hit. He stops and turns and says “I don’t have a gun” in an angry manner. He starts walking towards Wilson and opens his mouth to say something else when he’s gunned down. He’s asked if he could have moved, say, 20-22 feet after turning around and Dorian says “not that much, no.” He says that Wilson never ordered them to stop.
Any suggestion as to why? Seems to me, fingerprints would be more definite evidence that Brown had actually grabbed the gun.
(Perhaps I’m confused there. Did Wilson say that Brown grabbed the gun, or *attempted *to grab it?)
I’m thinking if he grabbed Wilson’s arm in an effort to keep him from bringing the gun to bear on him, the gun might have come in contact with him, or with his sprayed blood. But fingerprints on the gun would end that doubt.
Because they could see blood, and the fingerprints were hypothetical, especially given the nature of the struggle. In other words, they could dust for fingerprints, find nothing but the sort of smudgy crap you’d expect if someone was grappling for a gun, and then have ruined their chance to pull DNA.
Reading into that a little bit, finding Brown’s DNA on the gun puts him in close proximity. Finding his fingerprints would be better, but I’m not sure anyone knew at that point how critical it would be. Furthermore, fingerprints on the gun don’t prove that he was trying to *take *it. In fact, even Wilson’s own testimony is that Brown was pushing the gun down, into his thigh, as if to keep from being shot.
My big question reading that was, is it really impossible to swab a blood stain without running the damn thing up and down the length of the slide? Couldn’t they do both? I mean, they should know, they’re the experts, but that seems like a really silly limitation.
eta: Wilson’s statement (haven’t read his testimony yet) is that Brown’s hand was on the gun, such that it was interfering with the operation of it. So yes, per his statement there’d be a 100% chance of finding some of his body oils on the slide. A usable fingerprint? Who knows.
All they would need do is test one spot of blood at a time. If it’s Brown, that’s it, no need to test other spots. That done, then fingerprints could have been assessed. And if it isn’t, test another.
Leaving the lingering suspicion that the reason they did not ask the question is that they didn’t want to know the answer.
The crime scene detective testified that the standard testing procedure was to swab up and down the length of the gun. I wonder why that’s the standard testing procedure, but I have a hard time believing that a professional would testify under oath, in what might possibly be a very public record, that his office tests guns in an unusual and moronic manner. So I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that this is a common trade-off that police departments have to make.
There is a simple reason why they swab the whole area - the particular person’s blood may be concentrated only in one area. If you swab another spot, you may get someone else’s.
I… don’t follow. Are you saying that they want to swab the whole thing so they get all of the people’s DNA, and not just one person’s DNA from a single spot?
Whose? This still doesn’t make any sense. Let’s say the test blood spot A and it comes back as Mike Brown’s. Now that they have a positive match they can try to lift prints off the gun. Or if they don’t get a positive match, then they can try swabbing the whole thing.
Anyway, this is a tangent that’s not worth pursuing further, since I don’t think there’s any monkey business here.
Certainly troubling, and my personal opinion is that he made his own prejudices pretty clear during the press conference, but I’d respectfully ask that this sort of conjecture be taken to another thread.
There may have been Wilson’s blood on the gun, as well as Mike Brown’s. If you test one spot it may turn out to be Wilson’s blood, and you missed Mike Brown’s. Or vice versa.
The goal is to find out whose DNA is on the gun, right? Not just whether it is Michael Brown’s. By swabbing one spot you’re not reaching that goal.