"All
people in the St. Louis region deserve to feel safe in their
communities and to make their voices heard without fear of violence or
intimidation," Nixon said in a written statement.
There
is no specific date for a grand jury decision to be revealed, and Nixon
gave no indication that an announcement is imminent. But St. Louis
County Prosecutor Bob McCulloch has said that he expects the grand jury
to reach a decision in mid-to-late November.
The U.S. Justice Department, which is conducting a separate investigation, has not said when its work will be completed.
Before
the shooting, Wilson spotted Brown and a friend walking in the middle
of a street and told them to stop, but they did not. According to the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Wilson has told authorities he then realized
Brown matched the description of a suspect in a theft minutes earlier at
a convenience store. Wilson backed up his police vehicle and some sort
of confrontation occurred before Brown was fatally shot. He was unarmed
and some witnesses have said he had his hands up when he was killed.
Brown's shooting stirred
long-simmering racial tensions in the St. Louis suburb, where two-thirds
of the residents are black but the police force is almost entirely
white. Rioting and looting a day after the shooting led police to
respond to subsequent protests with a heavily armored presence that was
widely criticized for continuing to escalate tensions. At times,
protesters lobbed rocks and Molotov cocktails at police, who fired tear
gas, smoke canisters and rubber bullets in an attempt to disperse
crowds.
Nixon also declared a
state of emergency in August and put the Missouri State Highway Patrol
in charge of a unified local police command. Eventually, Nixon activated
the National Guard to provide security around the command center.
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