The grand jury investigating the police shooting of Michael Brown heard from more than 60 witnesses — including some who saw the confrontation from their cars, homes or the street. The documents show the jurors who ultimately decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson had to sift through accounts that often conflicted with each other. Here are some excerpts from the police interviews and testimony:

A person watching from their apartment balcony:

“I see a guy on the side, on the driver’s side of a police vehicle. I just see something going on through the window, like a tussling going on through the window…

“The moment they take off running, I see the officer immediately gets out of his vehicle, pull out his gun definitely in his shooting position, and let me see. Mike must have probably made it about right here in front of this driveway, as I said before, he didn’t make to there, he just when he gets out of the car he just immediately starts shoot…

“He’s taking like large steps so I didn’t see him like run or anything, so he is just taking large steps, you know, towards him, you know, while his back is turned toward him.

“[After grabbing my phone] …I see Mr. Brown kind of bent down a little bit with his arms tucked in like on his stomach so now I’m thinking that he’s now shot. He was going down, definitely so, and the officer just let out a few more rounds to him and he hit the ground and that’s when I see blood...

“I didn’t see the hands go up. I didn’t see no hands go up.”

A person watching from the street:

“It appeared as they were wrestling through the window and one gunshot had let off. And Mr. Brown took off running and my first thought was like ‘oh my gosh’ did I just witness a police officer being murdered because it took a while for the police officer to get out of the car and pursue the suspect.

“And I wanna say maybe six seconds, but it seemed like it was forever after the first gunshot. So, the police officer exited the vehicle with his weapon drawn pursuing Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown was quite a distance and he stopped and when he stopped he didn’t get down on the ground or anything. He turned around and he did some type of movement and he started charging towards the police officer.

“The police officer then returned fire, well not returned fire, open fire on Mr. Brown. Um, If I had to guess the shots and the distance between him and Mr. Brown, it would have to be five to ten yards and the shots that were fired was four, five to shots fired and Mr. Brown was still standing up.

“Um, and my thoughts was while he’s missing this guy this close, is he hitting him or because Mr. Brown there was no reaction from him to show that he was been hit. Um, after that, Mr. Brown then paused. He stopped running and when he stopped running the police officer stopped firing.

“And, then Mr. Brown continued, started again to charge towards him and after that the police officer returned fire and um well not returned fire and um well not returned. I’m using the wrong … started to fire once more at him. Um, if I had to guess the rounds that were fired then it would be four to five more shots and after that Mr. Brown collapsed and fell to the ground.”

Person in a third-floor apartment

“I couldn’t really tell what was going on. It was just a lot of movement going on by the window of the car...

"So I’m looking at the officer chase Michael down the street.”

“And at this time, I heard another shot fired while they were running. After that, [Brown] then turn[s], had his hands in the air, by the time that I saw him have his hands in the air he got shot. I heard two shots like specifically in my head, I saw those two shots. And he dropped down like kinda drop hands first, then knee, then face and everything else.”

Person pulling up near the scene in his car:

“I seen a young man standing near the cruiser, you head two shots fired And then a police officer hopped out of his cruiser and started chasing him, the dude turned back around and started charging towards the police officer, the police officer told him to stop at least three times…

“He was still down the street, he was running back…he put his hands up for a few seconds and then put his arms down and kind of put them close to his chest and he started running.

“And the boy wouldn’t stop, he fired three rounds, the dude kept running, fired four more rounds, and the finished off the rounds I guess, and he fell on the ground dead.”

Person walking on the street:

“I saw the officer back his van up and hit the two boys. Um, immediately his friend took off and…Mike he started like fighting with the officer through his window. I don’t know why they were fighting through the window but then you heard the first shot and all the cars on the street stopped. They started backing up.

“Then he, uh, started running. He stopped halfway and turned around and that’s when you heard the rest of the shows. And I don’t have really good eyes so I couldn’t see like exactly where he got hit or anything like that. But it was about seven, eight shots that I heard…And like he did have his hands up. People wasn’t just saying that. He did turn around and put his hands up.”

NBC

Twitter has suspended my account again. I have been told by people on Twitter that the Anonymous group is attacking accounts that are tweeting against FERGUSON & Shaun King.

I have asked Twitter what specifically the problem is with my account but will have to wait for days to get an answer.

If you could tweet to @support nicely asking for them to review my account to get it active again, I would really appreciate it.

Please let others know what is going on too.

Thank You,

Chris
chris1791.twitter at gmail.com

RASTAS

THE IRISH SLAVE TRADE – THE FORGOTTEN “WHITE” SLAVES

OCTOBER 28, 2008 DON JAIDE 289 COMMENTS

The Slaves That Time Forgot

By John Martin

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? After all, we know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade. But, are we talking about African slavery?

King James II and Charles I led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African.

The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves.

This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia.

There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry.

In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.

Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories. But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?

Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer? Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.

http://afgen.com/forgotten_slaves.html