By Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN
New video captured hours before Michael Brown was killed shows the 18-year-old exchanging marijuana for cigarillos with the clerks of a Ferguson, Missouri, store, a documentary director told CNN on Monday.
Director Jason Pollock, whose film “Stranger Fruit” debuted at the South by Southwest festival in Austin over the weekend, said the video shows that Brown did not rob the store before being stopped by police and that surveillance footage purporting to show Brown engaged in a robbery at the Ferguson Market and Liquor stores was actually video of Brown returning to the store to retrieve the cigarillos the clerks gave him.
“This is a shady store. We’ve asked a lot of people in this community. You can buy weed at the store,” Pollock said.
Pollock suggests that had this footage been released, it would’ve altered the notion that Brown was shot after robbing the store. He learned of the footage from a St. Louis County police report that mentioned a video from 1:13 a.m. the day of Brown’s death, he said.
#MikeBrown Sr sitting down w/ @Stranger_Fruit filmmaker @Jason_Pollock about how the film could help reopen #JusticeForMikeBrown case #sxsw pic.twitter.com/ESrovNzarj
— Artemis Moshtaghian (@ArtemisChats) March 12, 2017
Dad: Brown ‘not in the wrong’
In an earlier interview, in which he appeared alongside Brown’s father, Pollock said, “What this video shows is that (police) lied to the world about what happened. They wanted to make Mike look bad, so they put out half a video to destroy his character in his death.”
Brown’s father said the new video shows his son “was not in the wrong,” and he’d like to see the case reopened. He feels protests might not have turned into violent riots had the police been more forthcoming in the first place, he said.
Read more at http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/13/us/ferguson-michael-brown-surveillance-footage/
