An 18-year-old St. Louis man whom the police said they shot after he pointed a gun at officers died from a bullet that entered the middle of his back and lodged near his rib cage, the city’s chief medical examiner said Friday. The shooting, the latest killing of a black man by police officers, has raised tensions in the region.
But the examiner, Dr. Michael A. Graham, offered a bit of caution, saying that despite the bullet wound to the back, other physical evidence would have to be examined before conclusions could be drawn.
After nights of tense demonstrations in the wake of Wednesday’s killing of the teenager, Mansur Ball-Bey, in a foot chase by two white officers, the St. Louis police chief, Sam Dotson, urged caution about the medical examiner’s findings.
“We are still in the early stages of the investigation, and the new facts by themselves do not paint a complete picture,” Dotson said during a news conference at Police Headquarters.
Hours later, the city’s prosecutor, Jennifer M. Joyce, said her office would start an investigation parallel to the police’s. Typically, the prosecutor waits for the Police Department to finish its investigation before beginning its own.
The autopsy raises a question regarding the police account that Ball-Bey continued to run after he was shot and then collapsed.
Graham said he would have expected the teenager, Mansur Ball-Bey, to have been “incapacitated immediately” by the fatal gunshot.
“I would have expected him to go to the ground right away,” Graham said in an interview, though he declined to elaborate on how he reached that finding.
Dotson said that he had not seen that part of the report and declined to offer an explanation for the potential discrepancy. As far as the shot to the back, Chief Dotson said there were circumstances in which that could happen in a justifiable homicide, though he stressed that he was not making any conclusions about the shooting.
“The questions that have to be answered are, ‘Where was the subject standing?’” Dotson said. “‘Where were the officers standing? Were they running? Were they stopped? What was the angle?’”
Dotson added: “If an officer reasonably believes that his life or someone else’s life is in jeopardy, or fear of being harmed” then he could use deadly force.
The killing renewed tensions that have been bubbling for more than a year since a white officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson killed an unarmed black teenager. Many activists and residents have questioned the police’s narrative in the killing of Ball-Bey.
But a law firm representing Ball-Bey gave a different account of the shooting. Tonia Harris, a special consultant with the Legal Solution Group, said that witnesses they had interviewed said Ball-Bey was not at the house the police raided. He was in a backyard two houses away with one other person, Harris said.
The police said they were pelted with bricks and bottles and gave repeated warnings before deploying tear gas. But several demonstrators said the police were overly aggressive and did not give fair warning.