A Ferguson, Missouri, police officer was critically injured outside the city’s police station during protests marking 10 years since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, a pivotal moment in the national Black Lives Matter movement, police said Saturday.
Several people were arrested at the protest and five are facing charges, CBS News affiliate KMOV reported.
Ferguson police chief Troy Doyle said Officer Travis Brown suffered a severe brain injury Friday after being knocked to the ground.
“He is in an area hospital right now fighting for his life,” Doyle said.
Two other officers also were hurt, one sustaining an ankle injury and another an abrasion. Both were treated at the scene.
The team of officers went out to make arrests Friday for the destruction of property at the police station, where protesters gathered to remember 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was killed by Darren Wilson, a white police officer in 2014.
One of the suspects was charged Saturday with assault of a special victim, resisting arrest and property damage. He was ordered held on a $500,000 cash-only bond. No information was immediately listed in online court records, so it wasn’t known if he had an attorney yet.
One of the suspects, 28-year-old Elijah Gantt of East St. Louis, is charged with first-degree assault, resisting arrest, first-degree property damage and two counts of fourth-degree assault, KMOV reported. Police say Gantt was one of many who pulled on and damaged a section of fencing around the police station. Police said body camera footage showed officers ordering Gantt to stop and telling him he was being arrested.
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Doyle said the protesters were peaceful for the majority of the night. He said police allowed them to block the street outside the station, posting a squad car on each end, so they wouldn’t be hit by vehicles.
Police also didn’t intervene when the protesters began shaking the fence outside the station. But he said that when they broke part of the fencing, he sent out the arrest team. The suspect who charged at Officer Brown knocked him backward with his shoulder, and the officer hit his head as he tumbled to the ground, Doyle said.
Court records said the suspect then kept running and kicked two officers who tried to arrest him, leaving them with scratches and bruises.
Angelique Kidd, a Ferguson resident who was at the protest, told KMOV that police didn’t call for an unlawful assembly.
“They are supposed to notify us that it is an unlawful assembly to give the rest of the people a chance to leave, which they did not do,” Kidd said. She also said police rushed the protest.
“Police came out, rushed into a crowd. Panic, it was melee,” Kidd said.
Doyle said Officer Brown, who is Black, started with the department in January and previously worked for the St. Louis County Police Department.
He is part of a wave of Black officers hired into the department since 2014. Back then, there were just three Black officers in the department, but Black officers now make up more than half of the police force, Doyle said.
Christian Gooden//St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP
“He wanted to be part of the change,” Doyle said. “He wanted to make an impact in our community. He’s the type of officer that we want in our community. And what happens? He gets assaulted. I had to look his mother in the eye and tell her what happened to her son. I’m never going to do that again, I promise you that.”
St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell, who had stopped by the hospital beforehand to meet with the officer’s family, said others also would be charged.
“I always talk about you know the toughest part of this job is when we have a family that’s lost a loved one that we can’t bring justice to. And I’ve got to tweak that. The toughest thing I’ve had to do is talk and console with a mother who doesn’t know if her child is doing to make it. And for what?”
The Rev. Darryl Gray, a leading civil rights activist, urged the police chief to move with caution and “not to create an us versus them mentality.”
“Right now,” Gray added, “all of our efforts and energy need to be positive towards the recovery of the police officer. And then second to that, to do an investigation, a fair and unbiased investigation to determine what the evidence is.”
The arrests came as the St. Louis Fire Department placed a member of the department on leave after he made a social media post that the department described as insensitive.
“We take this matter seriously and do not condone such behavior,” the department wrote.
The department didn’t disclose the contents of the post, but several news outlets in the area reported that it read: “Happy ALIVE day to Darren Wilson!”
Michael Brown’s death turned Ferguson into a focal point of the national reckoning with the historically tense relationship between U.S. law enforcement and Black people.
In 2015, an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice also found no grounds to prosecute Wilson. But the report gave a scathing indictment of the police department — raising significant concerns about how officers treated Black people and about a court system that created a cycle of debt for many.