An independent New York medical examiner’s findings during his autopsy of Michael Brown, the college-ready teen who killed after being shot six times a suburban St. Louis cop, refutes definitively the Ferguson Police Department’s official version of events.
First, there “no evidence of a struggle” on Brown’s bullet-ridden body, meaning that he was not behaving aggressively toward the officer, Darren Wilson, who shot him multiple times.
Famed forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden of New York City casts multiple doubts on police accounts.
Another finding: most of the bullets appear to have struck Brown in the front, he said.
Another point of contention: the universal sign of surrender that witnesses said Brown performed before being killed and then left to rot on the street for two hours before he was taken away. One of the wounds on Brown’s right arm “could have occurred when he was putting his hands up,” said Prof. Shawn L. Parcells, a Kansas-based pathologist who assisted Baden.
Brown appears to have been shot at least six times from a distance, and all but the shot to the top of his head were most likely survivable, said the former medical examiner Baden.
That shot pierced his skull at an angle that suggests Brown was bending over, he said.
“He did not suffer,” Baden said.
Several witnesses have said that Brown had his hands in the air in a sign of surrender when Wilson shot him dead on Aug. 9.
“It verifies that the witness accounts were true,” said Brown family lawyer Benjamin Crump, who came to national renown by representing the parents of murdered teen Trayvon Martin int the sensational trial of George Zimmerman in suburban Orlando, Fla. “He was shot multiple times in broad daylight.”
The U.S. Department of Justice Department is also planning to conduct an autopsy and has initiated a separate investigation, Attorney General Eric Holder indicated.
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