A makeshift memorial sits in the middle of the street where 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police, in Ferguson, Mo., in this Aug. 11, 2014, file photo.The two friends’ morning intersected by chance in the parking lot of the Canfield Green apartment complex. Dorian Johnson had been up since 7 a.m. on this overcast August Saturday and after getting dressed, he was ready for a smoke – on any other morning a carefree ritual for easing into his day’s routine in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.
Heading out in search of a cigarillo to roll some marijuana, Johnson spotted 18-year-old Michael Brown on the walkway threading the cluster of three-story brick buildings. “Big Mike” had just finished helping a woman get her children into a car. Now the two men, who’d met just a few months earlier, fell into easy conversation.
“When I told him I was going to get cigarillos, he was like ‘I need one, too. Let’s walk to the store,'” Johnson recalled. It was the most mundane of decisions, of seemingly little consequence. But in that moment, Brown set off down a path that by a few minutes past noon would lead to his death in a burst of police gunfire, and a conflagration that upended his community and challenged many Americans’ conceptions of justice.
More than three months later, the world knows all about Ferguson, about the weeks of protests and rioting that followed the brief, but explosive encounter between a white police officer, Darren Wilson, and the black 18-year-old, and the deep veins of mistrust it exposed. But with a grand jury’s decision this week not to indict Wilson for Brown’s killing, prosecutors released thousands of pages of testimony, interviews and documents that shine new and often harsh light on the events that unfolded in this suburb’s darkest hours.
There are still parts of the story the public may never fully understand. Key facts about who did what remain clouded in conflicting narratives that nevertheless highlight a cascading series of poor choices. But the new information, taken together with what we already know, reveals lives and actions whose seeming ordinariness contrasts jarringly with the tragedy and turmoil unleashed when, by chance, they intertwined.