Authorities announced Friday the officer who shot 18-year-old Michael Brown had a good record and the incident came in the aftermath of a robbery in which the teen was a suspect, according to The Associated Press.
Darren Wilson, who shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown on Saturday afternoon outside an apartment complex, had served six years on the force and had a good record, Ferguson Police Chief Tom Jackson said at a news conference Friday, the AP reported.
Jackson said there had been a report of a robbery of cigars in a convenience store in the area a few minutes before Wilson encountered Brown walking down the street near an apartment complex, according to the AP. The robbery suspect had been described as a black male wearing a white T-shirt, according to police records Jackson released Friday.
Police had held back naming Wilson for nearly a week because of fears he could be harmed amid a volatile and sometimes-violent week of angry protests that have followed Brown's death, the AP reported.
The police version of the Saturday shooting of Brown says that Brown reached into the police car and struggled with the officer who shot and killed him, according to the AP. They said Wilson was injured during the incident and was treated in a hospital for swelling on the side of his face.
Some witnesses have said Brown was trying to get away from the officer, who had tried to grab him after telling him to move off the street where he was walking and onto a sidewalk, the AP reported. A Witness said Brown held up his hands in a sign of surrender but was shot several times in the street outside the apartment where he was walking to visit his grandmother.
Thousands of protesters demanding justice for Brown's killing have clashed with riot gear-clad local police since Saturday, though there was a marked shift Thursday to a calmer tone after the governor put an African-American Missouri Highway Patrol Captain in charge of security for the area, according to the AP.
Rather than confront protesters with riot gear, rubber bullets and tear gas, a small number of police mingled with the crowd Thursday night, urging a healing to the racially charged situation, the AP reported.
The protests cast a spotlight on racial tensions in greater St. Louis, where civil rights groups have complained in the past of racial profiling by police, of the arrests of a disproportionate number of blacks and of discriminatory police hiring practices, according to the AP.
Just three of Ferguson's 53-strong police force are black, while two-thirds of the town's population of 21,000 are black, the AP reported.