Ahh yes, several people on the scene simultaneously heard the same rumor via telepathy dispatched moments after the incident.
This is the best explanation
NPR's Melissa Block interviews Washington Post opinion writer Jonathan Capehart about his column, " 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' Was Built On A Lie." Capehart says he regrets the building of a movement on the false rumors that Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Mo., while putting up his hands in surrender. -
'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' Movement Built On False Rumors, Columnist Says
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It’s easy to see how protesters adopted -- and the media repeated -- the “hands up” mantra. The majority of eyewitnesses - 22 - told authorities that Brown’s hands were up when he was killed.
But DOJ investigators found the accounts of all 22 witnesses to be unreliable because other parts of those witnesses’ stories conflicted with physical or forensic evidence or with the accounts of credible witnesses.
Many of these witnesses denied incontrovertible evidence that Brown reached into the police car, struck Wilson in the face, was wounded by a gunshot inside the car, fled 180 feet, suffered no wounds in the back and then moved back at Wilson immediately before the fatal shots.
In many instances, the discounted witnesses repeated what they had heard from neighbors or on the news. Some witnesses admitted they made up stories so they could be part of a big event in their community.
Brown’s companion, Dorian Johnson, and friends quickly spread the word that Wilson had killed Brown execution style. An iPad recording and videos that captured conversations among the gathering crowd document the development of the false narrative.
When Attorney General Eric Holder released the Department of Justice report and a separate report documenting Ferguson’s deeply racist and unconstitutional police and municipal court practices, he said that Ferguson residents’ experience with racist police and court practices prepared them to suspect the worst when Wilson killed the unarmed teen.
To be part of something
When confronted with the ways in which their accounts differed from evidence, many witnesses acknowledged that they had made up details they hadn’t witnessed. Eight of the 22 eventually admitted they had lied about all or part of what they had claimed to see.
One admitted to be sitting in a flowerbed away from the shooting. Another acknowledged she hadn’t seen anything because she was smoking behind a dumpster.
Two of those who admitted lying said they just wanted “to be part” of something.
In addition to the eight who admitted lying, one woman admitted blacking out, a man admitted he may have hallucinated details and another woman broke into hysterics and was unable to give a cogent account.
Another witness had bad eyesight, another memory loss and psychiatric problems, another was fiddling with a cell phone camera and yet another was a regular protester who waited seven months before reporting anything and then admitted she was upset “Darren Wilson got away.”
The FBI concluded that this last account, by Witness 148, was fabricated in much the same way as the much publicized account of Witness 140 who had apparently invented a convoluted story to help clear Wilson.
Most of the rest of the 22 witnesses who said Brown’s hands were up gave accounts that were so at odds with physical evidence that they were not credible. Several swore that Wilson shot Brown in the back, even though there were no wounds in the back. Several said that Brown was kneeling and Wilson killed him execution style. Other witnesses claimed to see multiple police officers at the scene and multiple police cars.
None of that was true. -
Why did the Justice Department conclude that 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' was a myth?
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Witness accounts spread after the shooting that Brown had his hands raised in surrender, mouthing the words “Don’t shoot” as his last words before being shot execution-style. The gesture of raised hands became a symbol of outrage over mistreatment of unarmed black youth by police. -
‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ did not happen in Ferguson
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"It came after Dorian Johnson, the guy that was with Mike Brown, and others said that Mike Brown had his hands up," Russell says.
As residents gathered where Brown's body lay for hours in the street, Russell says, a local activist, Brother Anthony Shahid, was on the scene. Russell recalls that as more police came, with dogs and weapons, Shahid said, "My hands are up; don't shoot me." He and others began to chant.
"So it's very organic, but it comes actually out of the story of the life and the death of Mike Brown Jr.," he says.
The idea of Brown being shot while his hands were raised in surrender would spread like wildfire on social media, and became a rallying cry and a mantra that inspired demonstrations across the country — even as the debate about the accuracy of the phrase continues. -
Whether History Or Hype, 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' Endures
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FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — Some witnesses said Michael Brown had been shot in the back. Another said he was face-down on the ground when Officer Darren Wilson "finished him off."
Still others acknowledged changing their stories to fit published details about the autopsy or admitted that they did not see the shooting at all. -
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/078c...f14/grand-jury-documents-rife-inconsistencies
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And media coverage of the shooting's aftermath made it into the grand jury proceedings. Before some witnesses testified, prosecutors showed jurors clips of the same people making statements on TV.
Their inconsistencies began almost immediately after the shooting, from people in the neighborhood, the friend walking with Brown during the encounter and even one woman who authorities suggested probably wasn't even at the scene at the time.
Jurors also were presented with dueling versions from Wilson and Dorian Johnson, who was walking with Brown during the Aug. 9 confrontation. Johnson painted Wilson as provoking the violence, while Wilson said Brown was the aggressor.
But Johnson also declared on TV, in a clip played for the grand jury, that Wilson fired at least one shot at his friend while Brown was running away: "It struck my friend in the back."
Johnson held to a variation of this description in his grand jury testimony, saying the shot caused Brown's body to "do like a jerking movement, not to where it looked like he got hit in his back, but I knew, it maybe could have grazed him, but he definitely made a jerking movement."
Other eyewitness accounts also were clearly wrong.
One woman, who said she was smoking a cigarette with a friend nearby, claimed she saw a second police officer in the passenger seat of Wilson's vehicle. When quizzed by a prosecutor, she elaborated: The officer was white, "middle age or young" and in uniform. She said she was positive there was a second officer — even though there was not.
Another woman testified that she saw Brown leaning through the officer's window "from his navel up," with his hand moving up and down, as if he were punching the officer. But when the same witness returned to testify again on another day, she said she suffers from mental disorder, has racist views and that she has trouble distinguishing the truth from things she had read online.
Prosecutors suggested the woman had fabricated the entire incident and was not even at the scene the day of the shooting.
Another witness had told the FBI that Wilson shot Brown in the back and then "stood over him and finished him off." But in his grand jury testimony, this witness acknowledged that he had not seen that part of the shooting, and that what he told the FBI was "based on me being where I'm from, and that can be the only assumption that I have."
The witness, who lives in the predominantly black neighborhood where Brown was killed, also acknowledged that he changed his story to fit details of the autopsy that he had learned about on TV.
"So it was after you learned that the things you said you saw couldn't have happened that way, then you changed your story about what you seen?" a prosecutor asserted.
"Yeah, to coincide with what really happened," the witness replied.
Another man, describing himself as a friend of Brown's, told a federal investigator that he heard the first gunshot, looked out his window and saw an officer with a gun drawn and Brown "on his knees with his hands in the air." He added: "I seen him shoot him in the head."
But when later pressed by the investigator, the friend said he had not seen the actual shooting because he was walking down the stairs at the time and instead had heard details from someone in the apartment complex.
"What you are saying you saw isn't forensically possible based on the evidence," the investigator told the friend.
Shortly after that, the friend asked if he could leave.
"I ain't feeling comfortable," he said. -
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/078c...f14/grand-jury-documents-rife-inconsistencies
