Two Drinks, Some Cookies and a Corpse

Because of two energy drinks and a package of cookies, another deadly confrontation has unfolded in Missouri. Another African-American was shot dead by police. The 23-year-old victim, known to his neighbors as Powell, is reported to have brandished a knife and stolen the drinks and cookies around noon at the Six Stars Market in northern St. Louis.

Then he was seen talking loudly to himself in the street outside the store. When the police arrived, the obviously disturbed man called out to them, “Shoot me!” And that’s precisely what they did. Both policemen opened fire and the man died on the spot. Police spokesperson Ed Kuntz later said that he had brandished a knife and refused to drop it. When he began advancing toward the officers, they opened fire.

One young man described the incident as a spillover from Ferguson, Missouri, 30 minutes away by car, where 10 days earlier unarmed teenager Michael Brown had been shot by police. The latest victim was said to have taken part in the Ferguson demonstrations, as many young people from St. Louis had done.

Bernard Maclin described the mood there as extremely tense, adding that everyone in St. Louis had lost their senses. Everyone was angry, he said; some because the shooter in Ferguson was still walking around free even after 10 days of demonstrations, and some because they felt threatened by the increasingly shrill criticism of the police. He said it was highly dangerous having a heavily armed police presence facing them.

An elderly man joins in. Juan Bradley fought in the Vietnam War when he was 17 years old, and now complains that decades later his family still lives in a ghetto, while the people “who fought against us” — among them Afghans — have come to the United States and opened businesses.

He calls the Ferguson shooting “murder” because the police gunned down an unarmed man. “They’ve been killing black people for centuries,” he adds angrily. Then he corrects himself and says it’s not so much black against white as it is police brutality.

Several dozen youths congregate on Riverview Boulevard in north St. Louis Tuesday afternoon. Some hold hand-written signs bearing the Ferguson slogan: “Hands Up – Don’t Shoot.”

An elderly woman faints and is helped by the fire department. A resident on the other side of the street witnessed the latest police shooting from her window, and says that shooting him in the leg or with a taser would have been enough to put the confused man out of action. A dozen observers from the human rights organization Amnesty International, still in Ferguson, will come to the new violence venue in St. Louis.

Later that night there were several arrests after plastic water bottles were thrown by some in the crowd toward the police. The police called on people to disperse and go home. Compared to Monday night, all remained relatively calm.

In contrast to his Ferguson counterpart, St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson made a statement to the public on Tuesday evening. He described the incident from the perspective of the police officers who fired the deadly shots and never once expressed any doubt about the necessity of shooting to kill a deranged man over the theft of two drinks and a couple of cookies.