Just two months after teenager Michael Brown was killed by Ferguson, Mo., policeman Darren Wilson, another unarmed 18-years-young Black male was also fatally shot by a different local area Caucasian cop. After last Wednesday evening’s shooting death of Vonderrit Myers Jr. in St. Louis, over 400 angry demonstrators chanted, marched and protested through the city’s streets for the next few days.
“We’re young, we’re strong, we’re marching all night long!” and “Fight back, fight back!” they repeatedly chanted.
Last Thursday, Syreeta Myers stated that her son was carrying a sandwich, not a gun, as cops claimed, when they shot him 17 times, killing him instantly. “Police lie. They lied about Michael Brown, too,” she commented.
Several people were arrested last Thursday evening after protestors allegedly damaged a few cop cars near the murder site in the city’s Shaw section, close to the Missouri Botanical Gardens. They became unruly, burning and stomping on American flags as other cops watched. One law enforcement agent was slightly injured.
“It’s not our flag,” vented Elizabeth Vega, an artist who said she’s been protesting since Brown’s August murder. “Our children are being killed in the street. This flag doesn’t cover Black or Brown people.”
Observer Gina Gowdy, 46, who stood for hours waving an upside-down American flag, said, “I have three grandsons. This has to stop. They are assassinating our Black young men. People are fed up.”
St. Louis Police Lt. Col. Alfred Adkins told reporters that the cop approached four men on the street to question them. “As he exited the car, the gentlemen took off running. He was able to follow one of them before he lost him and then found him again as the guy jumped out of some bushes across the street,” Adkins stated. “The officer approached, they got into a struggle, they ended up into a gangway, at which time the young man pulled a weapon and shots were fired. The officer returned fire and unfortunately the young man was killed.”
Police reported recovering a 9mm Ruger from the scene.
The victim’s family, however, refute those claims. “The police are lying,” Joseph Cotton, Myers’s grandfather, said outside the family home Thursday.
The St. Louis Police Department has refused to identify the 32-year-old off-duty cop, who is a six-year veteran of the force and was heading to his second job as a private security guard and reportedly wearing a uniform when he killed Myers.
The awareness of police brutality has been heightened across the country recently with several high-profile police killings. Cops in this country shoot and kill an average of 1,000 people a year, 1 in 4 of whom are unarmed, according to a report by the Police Policy Studies Council.