I have some questions about the Shaw shooting
Last edited Fri Oct 10, 2014, 01:23 PM - Edit history (1)
I have read many reports about this story. There are conflicting stories, from the police and from the people v the police.
The stories from the police range from "he jumped from the bushes" and began a struggle with the officer, to he ran up a hill and started shooting at the officer. http://www.boston.com/news/nation/2014/10/09/the-louis-shooting-michael-brown-all-over-again/yRBAonyY59Zf1XtgUJBAqK/story.html
I don't know the layout of St Louis. Is it possible to have been in the places the officer claims Myers was after leaving the store? So he left the store, ended up however far it was from the store to where he was first sighted by the officer, then being chased in a vehicle then on foot only to end up back at the store all in 10 minutes time?
How is it these kids ran after the vehicle did a uturn but they fled after an attempted "pedestrian check." And what caused this supposed "pedestrian check" if they were just walking down the street?
How convenient is it that the gun found was one that was reported stolen? But how do you mix up the type of gun? I am not at all familiar with guns. I couldn't tell you the name of any gun by sight. But I am not a police officer. It was first identified as a Ruger then as a Smith & Wesson. Are they that similar they could be mistaken for each other? http://m.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/teen-died-from-gunshot-to-right-cheek-medical-examiner-says/article_2d5a8c2a-97db-5cec-a477-1130d7d26f7e.html?mobile_touch=true
Some witnesses say Myers was tased. Police say the police officer in question was not issued a taser. First off, why not? And that doesn't mean he didn't purchase one on his own or he wasn't issued one by the security company. A company that has had complaints against it for use of force. A company that has its website down.
The Chief has stated that they have the bullet and trajectory of the shots already studied. But they still don't have the gun powder tests from the victim. This is the easiest, fastest test available. How can an autopsy already be completed and gun trajectory done a day ago but no gun powder residue test completed? Don't forget, this is the same guy who, before knowing there was a video of the murder of Kajieme Powell, said that Powell was wielding the knife overhead at the officers.
Why was an off duty officer, working for a private security firm, wearing his uniform for a police department?
I have so many questions. There are too many inconsistencies. At this point, I don't know I will believe anything that comes from the police.
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/10/another-police-shooting-st-louis-white-cop
I'm seriously asking. I would love an answer to any of this. Especially the gun and the area.
= new reply since forum marked as read
There has not been one thing, that I have seen anyway, that justifies their being chased, signaled out or to have to put up with a "Pedestrian Check."
Cubs HAVE to win sometime. I mean damn, the odds alone say that! 
which I think is pretty much like other cities.
I've had a condo in Chicago for years and have had no experience of crime at all.
In my hometown of Philadelphia, however, I had two home invasions in one year. 
However, I was replying to a post about the Gold Coast being a high crime area. And, although you know the Southside, Canaryville, etc, has a higher violent crime rate, Lincoln Park is sure a pretty scary place for a woman to walk alone at night.
By the way, 
neighbor!
What area are you living in ?
As a woman myself, I'm curious -- you think Lincoln Park is a scarier place than most to walk alone at night?
In my experience, Lincoln Park and Lakeview (where I live part-time) is filled with
lots of young people strolling around and having fun -- at least on the weekends.
If you're talking about LATE at night when the neighborhood is deserted.
well, yeah, I'd say any neighborhood is scary for women then.
It's ugly, but similar things have happened after big crowd events like the Puerto Rican Day parade
and other stuff.
Rogers park is a place I'd likely avoid, especially at night.
My lakeview neighborhood (Addison & Lakeshore) seems pretty safe,
but in any city, you must always keep your wits about you.
All that said, I Love cities. 
I was raised in a city and only now live full time in the 'burbs because of my spouse.
but in the spring and summer, OMG No place better!! It's practically orgasmic
I don't hear about crime in the loop.
But anyway, since they tore down the projects all over Chicago and the place that those criminals lived all over the city, that when the s**t hit the fan. It hasn't been right since. Thank you Mayor Daley! Where does his behind live? 
Sounds remarkably like the one Zimmerman told. Plagiarism perhaps? 
You're right
Hi Jack!
Just love kisses!
show solidarity. Were I younger and single, I'd be heading there myself (were I not there already), but the last thing the resistance there needs is an old, overweight, out-of-shape white guy (albeit with a loud mouth
The bravery of the Ferguson resistance takes one's breath away. It's really scary going up against pigs in riot gear. Requires a lot of bravery and fortitude.
That's actually on my list. I have been a little immersed in Kent State stuff of late. Maybe I should back away for a bit.
Thanks again!
I think it should be required reading. I think probably 25% of my posts anymore are about it
I will check it out.
but I do know guns.
Accordng to the article the gun was a 9mm purchased at Cabelas; that really helps narrow things down. They sell 8 different S&W pistols in 9mm, per the Cabelas website.
Comparing what they sell with Ruger pistols, the S&W M&P series and SDVE do resemble Ruger's SR9 pistol at a quick glance.
?
Obviously anyone can easily tell the difference once they examine the gun by simply reading the manufacturers name on the side.
The discrepancy would make sense, IMO, if the initial report of it being a Ruger was made at the scene while in the midst of processing evidence. An officer might have assumed he knew what type the gun was without actually handling it but merely viewing it at distance.
I can not imagine any other scenario where such a mistake is possible due to the prominent markings on both pistols.
I just read that link and I didn't see anything about determining the firearm used?
You're talking about this guy
Lavell Boyd, 47, lives in the neighborhood and said he happened upon the scene as he was going to a store on Shaw to pick up a sandwich. Boyd said he heard 14 or 15 shots as he was in his car.
“When I pulled up I saw the cop standing over him (Myers) then he pointed the gun at everyone else telling everyone to get back while he was searching for another clip,” Boyd said
He didn't see the shooting but was there seconds after.
It would take a lot of things for this officer to devise this plan of retrieving and planting a gun
Going up the hill and firing into the pavement at the bottom of the hill to make it look
like MR Myers fired at him with crowds of people seconds away including this guy who says he heard the shots in
his car and was there pretty much seconds later.
It just doesn't sound plausible that the officer could have done all this in this short of a time
Also please let us not forget that MR Myers had a history of carrying a illegal weapon
This is MR Myers in the lower right
I had to phone a friend who knows more about forensics than I do.
I knew GSR tests for lead (from the bullet), antimony and barium (from the primer); and not much more than that.
What I learned is yes those chemicals, and occasionally some others, are looked for to determine the possibility a person fired a gun. But (and this is big) the chemicals never really break down nor can they be fully washed away. Therefore if a person has ever fired a gun in their life the GSR test will be positive.
A GSR test by itself will be ripped to shreds by a defense attorney in court. It is only a very small piece of evidence used to prove guilt. More often it is used in interrogation to convince a suspect that police know more than they actually do, hoping for an incriminating statement while trying to explain away GSR.
In this case I believe that GSR wasn't used because they know what the result likely would be, positive all around.
On the darker side, if Mr. Myers was tested for GSR and came back negative (unlikely if he has handled weapons but not impossible) that would prove he did not fire any shots and throw the key part of the narrative right out the window. In short the police have nothing to gain by doing a GSR test.
This is a lot of stuff to chew up and swallow, so I'll go point-by-point. I'm going to not respond in the order that you asked them because some of the answers to later questions are relative to earlier questions. Also, a lot of the questions you've asked have been asked elsewhere in other ways. So, I'll be "paraphrasing" some of you questions, though that's even a bit loose of a description. But, hopefully, this can help out.
I've been studying on this a good bit since yesterday morning. I'd like to think that I have a pretty good handle on all of this, at least as it stands right now.
So:
"Wasn't he off-duty?/Why was he in his uniform at a second job?"
I have to admit that this had me a little puzzled as well, because it would seem counter-intuitive that someone working a private job should go around basically presenting himself as an on-duty police officer. The other side of that coin is that this is done all the time around here, though not quite in the same way. Utility companies, construction crews, and the like hire off-duty police officers to do things like direct traffic in a public street. So it's not like this is without precedent.
But an article today in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch really cleared this up. Short version: smaller townships in the city and county will often hire off-duty officers to provide extra patrol in that area via a private security company. Officers acting in this capacity are required to be in their full uniform just as if they were working at their regular police job.
Sometimes St. Louis police officers are on patrol in city neighborhoods for an employer other than the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
Just as the St. Louis Cardinals pay uniformed police for extra security, so do several city neighborhoods. The difference is these neighborhoods pay private companies for the services of public employees to patrol public places.
They pool their money through assessments or special taxes — and buy the security services from middlemen.
Certain neighborhoods that can afford it can get more St. Louis police.
Not only can police officers wear their police uniforms while they are working “secondary” — they are required to.
{emphasis mine}
So, that sort of clears that up. What was this guy doing? Well, he was basically being a cop just like he would at his regular job. He was empowered with all other police powers just as if he was on duty at his regular job, and presumably he would do regular patrols, write traffic tickets as warranted, work traffic accidents, respond to calls within that particular "mini-jurisdiction," etc.
Now, maybe that's right (in the sense that St. Louis should be doing that) or maybe it's wrong, but one way or the other, we at least have an understanding what was going on, the mindset of the officer, etc. We know that he was not just playing a glorified security guard at a liquor store or warehouse or whatever: he was thinking and acting like a cop because he was acting AS a cop.
That leads us to:
"Why was he chasing these guys in the first place? What did they do to attract his attention?"
Knowing that he was, effectively, a cop on patrol just like at his "day job," the narrative that the police chief gave makes a good bit more sense:
The officer followed one of the young men, identified as Myers, into a gangway. He was running and holding his waistband in a way that caused the officer to suspect he had a gun, according to police.
Any time any cop sees someone who makes eye contact with the police turn and burn, that will arouse suspicion, and rightly so. Someone who obviously bolts from the police almost certainly either is doing something or has done something that they don't want discovered. In this particular case, maybe the guy was farther away from home than he should have been on his GPS monitor (his attorney seems to think this isn't the case). Maybe he thought the cop had seen that he had a gun. Maybe he's just a nervous sort. Who knows? Regardless, there doesn't seem to be any dispute that he did indeed take off running when he saw the police coming. And that's a plenty valid reason for the police to give chase.
"So what happened next?"
Here's the police chief's description:
The officer followed one of the young men, identified as Myers, into a gangway. He was running and holding his waistband in a way that caused the officer to suspect he had a gun, according to police.
Myers turned and approached the officer in "an aggressive manner," police said, and the officer told Myers to surrender. Myers continued to come at the officer and the two struggled. A sweatshirt the man was wearing came off during the struggle, police said.
Myers then ran from the officer, up an incline in the 4100 block of Shaw, and the officer saw what he believed to be a gun. He did not immediately fire because he wanted to be sure it was a firearm, police said. Myers turned and pointed a gun toward the officer and fired at least three shots, police said.
As Myers fired, the officer returned fire, police said. Myers continued to pull the trigger, but his gun apparently jammed.
A Lt. Col. (possibly the chief's lieutenant, but it doesn't say for sure) gave this description:
"The officer approached, they got into a struggle, they ended up into a gangway, at which time the young man pulled a weapon and shots were fired. The officer returned fire and unfortunately the young man was killed," Adkins added.
So that's where the "jumped out of the bushes" part came. It's not somehow mutually-exclusive with the chief's narrative.
Basically, when it turned into a foot-chase, the three guys split up. For whatever reason, the cop chose Myers to follow. At some point, Myers apparently hid in some bushes, and then when the cop was closing in, he took off running again.
Then he ran "onto a gangway." This part I'm not really getting. A gangway is an elevated platform for walking, in other words something like a catwalk. Here's the google image of the general vicinity of where this happened:
[IMG]
[/IMG]
I don't see anything there that looks like what I would describe as a "gangway." Furthermore, St. Louis is, for the most part, pretty flat, so I'm not really getting where this "incline" is supposed to be, other than perhaps the berm that elevates the interstate to the north.
So this is a case of some terminology that probably can't really be understood well unless one is actually there, physically at the scene, or at least knows the area pretty well.
So he left the store, ended up however far it was from the store to where he was first sighted by the officer, then being chased in a vehicle then on foot only to end up back at the store all in 10 minutes time?
I don't know anyone who said that he came back to the store. He left the store, which is at the corner of Shaw Boulevard and Klemm Street (left edge in the above picture) and was walking east on Shaw Boulevard when the chase began. All of this happened in the space of a city block, not some vast stretch of real estate.
How convenient is it that the gun found was one that was reported stolen?
That's pretty much completely expected. The VAST majority of "street guns" are stolen from somewhere. There's nothing particularly "convenient" or surprising about that fact at all.
But how do you mix up the type of gun?
As the Marine kindly noted above, the two models are potentially similar in appearance.
I would also point out that police tend to think less about makes and models and more about calibers. They think, first and foremost, about the "9mm" part, and then about the make and model later. When your life revolves around the potential of bullets flying at you, you think about what kind of bullet first, and what kind of gun later. And really, people are making a much bigger deal of this than it really is. Details get mixed up in early reporting. This is hardly the first time this has happened.
Some witnesses say Myers was tased.
Here, it's time for people to seriously slow their roll a minute and dial back the emotion to instead deal with actual facts. To date, there has not been a single actual, documented witness to this event. There have been lots of people who have CLAIMED to have been witnesses, there have been lots of people who have claimed others were witnesses, but there hasn't been a single actual, credible, documented witness at this point. The link you cited from boston.com, for example, makes a sidelong claim:
“He was unarmed,” Teyonna Myers, a relative of the victim told the St. Louis Dispatch. “He had a sandwich in his hand, and they thought it was a gun. It’s like Michael Brown all over again.”
The juxtaposition there strongly suggests that Ms. Myers was a witness. She was not. She was nowhere near where this happened when it happened. She arrived on the scene after the police chief. She's just making this claim about the sandwich out of thin air. She didn't actually see what happened at all.
Neither did anyone else.
Let this be crystal clear to everyone: as of this moment, at least as for what has been disclosed to the public, there were no witnesses to this event.
Therefore, any claims about "witness accounts" are just abject bunk. Someone may have witnessed Myers leaving the store, someone may have witnessed the guys running, but at least as of the facts available to date, no one actually witnessed the shooting.
As for the taser, that is pretty clearly another case of supposed "witnesses" who didn't actually see anything at all. The cop didn't have a taser, St. Louis doesn't issue tasers, and the security company has said that they don't use tasers, either. So the whole "taser" bit was just made up of whole cloth by one or more "witnesses" who are really rumor-mongerers.
"Why don't they use tasers?"
Tasers and other such "less lethal" weapons often cause more problems than they solve. Lots of departments around the country have either gotten rid of tasers or never started using them in the first place because they caused problems. The average, ordinary public thinks that tasers are somehow "safe." They aren't. They aren't a bullet to the heart, but they're a hair's breadth away from the electric chair. They can, and have in a lot of cases, killed people, in the name of being "less lethal." Somewhat ironically, the very people that tasers are most needed for, people whacked out of their brains on some drug, are the ones most likely to wind up dead from a taser strike.
The Chief has stated that they have the bullet and trajectory of the shots already studied. But they still don't have the gun powder tests from the victim. This is the easiest, fastest test available.
First of all, it's a pretty big leap to say that GSR testing is "the easiest, fastest test available," particularly when juxtaposed against bullet trajectories. It doesn't cost anything to determine bullet trajectories, and those tests are pretty much instant; it does take some time (granted, not a lot) to determine GSR, and those tests do indeed cost some money and, to be admissible in court, need to be performed under documented laboratory conditions.
The first rule of Forensics Club is that you can't rush forensics, at least not if you want them to stand up in court. Everything that is done is done in an exceptionally, often excruciatingly, methodical, carefully-documented way, so that the lab results are to be utterly unimpeachable on the stand. Anyone who watched the OJ trial, or even the Zimmerman trial, has had a painful lesson in how seriously lawyers can pick apart lab evidence like a vulture on a desert carcass.
The M.E. has only released the preliminary results of the medical examination. In other words, the coroner has given the body a cursory look, and determined the number of shots that struck the body and approximately where. The rest of the autopsy, at least as of this moment, either hasn't been completed or it hasn't been released.
Most autopsies for serious criminal cases take several days, not 24 hours.
Anyway, I hope this can help clear some of this up. I've been doing what I can to wrap my arms around this whole thing myself, and it's certainly not easy with all of the media noise going on.
