The parents of Michael Brown Jr. hit the morning shows on Wednesday to talk about the grand jury’s decision this week to not indict officer Darren Wilson, and the subsequent unrest in Ferguson.
“Our son is gone and we’re dealing with it, but there are other families that went through the same situation, and we all just want change. … We’ve just been disrespected all around,” Michael Brown Sr. told CBS This Morning. To the grand jury, he’d say, “Why did you choose to wake up with a chip on your shoulder and do what you did? Not just to our son, but to any human being?”
In response to Wilson’s account of the events, Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden said, “He would never provoke anyone to do anything to him and he wouldn’t do anything to anybody — I don’t believe a word of it.”
Their attorney Benjamin Crump also highlighted how Wilson was never cross-examined, and Brown mentioned how Wilson is known for falsifying reports.
“If something did happen in that store — and that’s a big if — that could’ve been dealt with, but you didn’t have to do what you did. He didn’t do what he had to do, he did what he wanted to do,” McSpadden continued of Wilson. “I don’t think he wanted to kill my son, but he wanted to kill someone. … And how could your conscience be clear, even if it was an accidental death?”
McSpadden said she does not regret standing among the protesters on Monday night, and added of Missouri governor Jay Nixon, who has never offered her family his condolences, “put it out there and infuriated those people. From day one, on Aug. 9, … voices were heard about if there weren’t an indictment, how they would react. … We continued to ask for calm and protest in a peaceful manner. … We can’t be held accountable for anybody’s other actions if it’s not our actions, and that’s not what we asked for.”
On “Today,” Brown Sr. expressed hope for a conviction for Wilson in federal court — “We’re just going to keep fighting and pray for a better outcome,” he said — and explained that they’re also pushing for a law requiring police officers to wear body cameras across the country, and asking supporters to “not just make noise, let’s make a difference.”
In response to Wilson’s description of the unarmed teen as a “demon,” McSpadden called it “insult after injury” and is “so disrespectful.”
Though Brown hasn’t watched Wilson’s ABC News interview yet, he plans to, and said of the officer’s account of the events that led to the death of Michael Brown, “For one, my son, he respected law enforcement. … Two, who in their right mind would rush or charge at a police officer that has his gun drawn? It sounds crazy.”
“When you have people of color being killed, they try to demonize and play on the stereotypes, and they try to put the police officer who killed our children on a pedestal,” Crump added. “It’s just not right, and we have to fix this system.”
While McSpadden’s husband Louis Head was seen in video footage as encouraging the violent protests on Monday night, McSpadden defended, “He was just emotional. I don’t think he was stirring the crowd, the crowd was already stirred” by Nixon, she repeated.
Crump added, “No one is condoning violence. You lose your child in this manner, and someone put a video camera on you in raw emotion, who knows what you would do if this was your child laying on the ground for four hours, and you find out that the killer isn’t gonna be brought to trial?”
Watch the Today interview below.
