A New Look at the Work of “Demons”

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Well, if you thought brutality looked like the welts on the back of an enslaved man named Peter, William Brown’s charred body, or Emmett Till’s battered face, then here’s a new set of images to add to your collection: Officer Darren Wilson’s Evidence Photos. Wilson’s face shows the marks of what a young man that he would describe as having the look of a demon does with his evil powers.

The testimony that Darren Wilson offers of his brush with death just drips with the racial grammar, including all its parts of speech, comprising the narrative of white American freedom and black American death:

Like I said, I was just so focused on getting the gun out of me. When I did get it up to this point, he is still holding onto it and I pulled the trigger and nothing happens, it just clicked. I pull it again, it just clicked again.

At this point I’m like why isn’t this working, this guy is going to kill me if he gets ahold of this gun. I pulled it a third time, it goes off. When it went off, it shot through my door panel and my window was down and glass flew out of my door panel. I think that kind of startled him and me at the same time.

According to The New York Times, “[t]he gunshot startled Mr. Brown, Officer Wilson said. Officer Wilson said Mr. Brown stepped back. And then came forward. He had his hands up, but Officer Wilson did not see this as a sign of surrender – quite the opposite.” Here’s what Officer Wilson saw:

The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked. He comes back towards me again with his hands up.

Despite being in a police truck, a Tahoe, presumably with gas and keys in the ignition, Officer Wilson becomes so entranced by the “demon” who comes toward him in a posture of surrender, with his hands up, Brown manages to punch Wilson–though he’s uncertain about that part–so he fires again. And again. After Michael “demon” Brown is shot several times at this point, Wilson claims Brown tried to flee and the Officer gets out of his truck and chased him. After telling Brown to get on the ground Officer Wilson states:

He turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he’s coming back towards me. His first step is coming towards me, he kind of does like a stutter step to start running. When he does that, his left hand goes in a fist and goes to his side, his right one goes under his shirt in his waistband and he starts running at me.

Obviously, Wilson thinks Brown’s got a gun–which doesn’t explain why Brown would have gone for the officer’s–so Wilson, horrified by this scene, states:

At this point it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him. And the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn’t even there, I wasn’t even anything in his way.

Having been ignored (which is actually the crime Brown commits: in the U.S. black people must always acknowledge their awareness of white authority and white supremacy), Wilson describes what happens next:

And when he gets about that 8 to 10 feet away, I look down, I remember looking at my sites and firing, all I see is his head and that’s what I shot. I don’t know how many, I know at least once because I saw the last one go into him. And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank, the aggression was gone, it was gone, I mean I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped.

Of course his final statement makes complete sense: killing someone does stop them from threatening you… I hope the folk over at Marvel are paying attention ’cause Wilson just invented the next villain for whatever summer blockbuster they’re planning.

Lord have mercy…