Big black hulk
by digby
Last night on twitter as the reaction to the Grand Jury decision came in I got lots of pushback from wingnuts about the fact that I claimed the problems wasn’t “mistrust of the police” as president Obama but that it was the police killing unarmed citizens. Most of the tight wingers claimed that Michael Brown was armed — with his big body — and therefore Wilson was justified. Apparently, it was so big that it was a lethal weapon even when it was 20 feet from the police car.
Anyway, here’s how Darren Wilson described Brown in his testimony:
“I go to open the door and I say, hey, come here for a minute to Brown. As I’m opening the door he turns, faces me, looks at me and says, “What the fuck are you going to do about it,” and shuts my door, slammed it shut. I haven’t even got it open enough to get my leg out, it was only a few inches.
I then looked at him and told him to get back and he was just staring at me, almost like to intimidate me or to overpower me. The intense face he had was just not what I had expected from any of this…
And when I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan.”
Wilson testified that Brown punched him twice through the patrol car’s door, and he was nervous that a third punch “could be fatal.” After his gun fired twice during the encounter, Brown ran away. Brown did not get on the ground, Wilson recounted, as per his order. Instead, he started to charge back toward Wilson:
“At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots. Like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.”
“Bulking up to run through the shots?” It seems he saw him literally as The Hulk.
This is not an excuse for shooting an unarmed man. It is the sign of an immature, unqualified police officer with issues.
When you hear testimony like that you have to wonder what it would have been like if a real trial could have been held with a real prosecutor. I’d guess that statements like that might have been challenged.
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