*UPDATE* The AP has revised its original dispatch to include confirmation that the officer involved in last night’s fatal shooting is white. His identity has not yet been disclosed.
*UPDATE* Via Weasel Zippers, a YouTube video captures a gas tank exploding at the service station where the shooting occurred. According to the title of the video, a provocateur hurled fireworks at a pump near police.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc5hRAD_H2g
One officer suffered lower leg injuries while trying to get away from the fireworks…. A St. Ann police officer was hit by a rock or brick and taken to the hospital
Ready for Round 2 (or is it Round 12 or Round 49)? Hard to say, but another deadly police shooting has occurred in another suburb of St. Louis.
The Associated Press reports:
Scuffles broke out early Wednesday between police officers and a vocal crowd of several hundred people who taunted the officers at the scene of the late Tuesday shooting in Berkeley, Missouri. Police have not released details of any arrests. Berkeley is just a few miles from Ferguson, where a white police officer fatally shot black 18-year-old Michael Brown in August.
The dispatch goes states that information has not been released about either the identity or ethnicity of the man killed or of the police officer who shot him, but the International Business Times and several other sources have confirmed that the dead man is 18-year-old Antonio Martin, who was black.
According to a statement from St. Louis County police spokesman Sgt. Brian Schellman, a Berkeley police officer was conducting a routine business check at a gas station around 11:15 p.m. Tuesday when he approached two men.
One of the men pulled a handgun and pointed it at the officer, Schellman said. The officer fired several shots, fatally wounding the man. The second man fled, and the dead man’s handgun has been recovered, according to Schellman.
Protesters assembled early Wednesday, milling around the gas pumps at the station where the shooting occurred. Some wore strands of yellow police-line tape draped around their neck; others wore it as a headband.
The AP quotes one of the protesters, 36-year-old Orlando Brown, who said he didn’t have all the details about the shooting but wondered if it was another case of police aggression.
I understand police officers have a job and have an obligation to go home to their families at the end of the night. But do you have to treat every situation with lethal force? … It’s not a racial issue, or black or white. It’s wrong or right.
Brown was pepper-sprayed during the protest.
