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Saturday 13 September 2014 - 12:54

New Ferguson video provides new evidence

Story Code : 409516
New Ferguson video provides new evidence
The cellphone video, obtained by the Associate Press, shows a witness raising his hands in the air right after white police officers shot dead Brown.
 
The video shows two landscapers working near the street where Brown was shot by white officer Darren Wilson on August 9. It can be heard that a man saying, "He had his (expletive) hands up," in the video which also shows one of the workers raises his own hands in the air.
 
Brown was shot six times by Wilson, 28, after he stopped him for allegedly walking down the street and blocking traffic.
 
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the man who took the video asserted the voice belongs to the worker who raised his hands.
 
Describing the video as "of paramount significance", the attorney for Brown's family, Benjamin Crump, said the two workers have already told the family their account of the shooting.
 
"Not because they were not residents of Ferguson, and not because the construction workers were Caucasian, but because it is a contemporaneous recording of their immediate actions of what they had just witnessed," Crump said. "It's the best evidence you can have other than a video of the actual shooting itself."
 
The US Justice Department is currently launching a broad civil rights investigation into the conduct of the Ferguson police department.
 
The investigation comes as the FBI itself is conducting another civil rights investigation specifically looking into the shooting death of the African-American teenager.
 
The population in Ferguson, a city of about 20,000 people just north of St. Louis, is about two-thirds African-American. The city’s Police Department has 53 officers and only four of them are black.
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