Jeff, this is
absolutely incorrect. Dorian Johnson - Mike Brown's friend, the most frequently cited pro-Brown eyewitness to the shooting and Mike Brown's accomplice during the robbery, himself acknowledged in court testimony to the grand jury that "Big Mike" took the cigars without paying.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slat...lson_grand_jury_dorian_johnson_testimony.html (the testimony itself needs some scrolling down, but is absolutely fascinating reading)
For the tl;dr version:
http://www.vox.com/2014/11/25/7287443/dorian-johnson-story
"Johnson says he ran into Brown on his way to buy some cigarillos from the convenience store. The two men decided to smoke weed together later, so Brown goes with Johnson to get some cigarillos of his own. Only Brown doesn't buy any cigarillos. He steals them — in fact, he steals
a lot of them — and then shoves his way past the clerk.
In Johnson's telling, he's shocked. And he's terrified. Brown, he says, "is basically laughing it off, be cool, be calm…but in my head I’m like, I can’t be calm, I can’t be cool, because I know what just happened and we were on camera." Johnson has a daughter. He has a girlfriend. And now he's Brown's accomplice in a robbery — a robbery that was probably caught on a security camera. His friend has put him and his family in danger."
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Vox is
not the Daily Mail or Free Republic or some Republican nonsense. Vox is fairly well-known to be left-leaning and even now is adamantly pro-Brown, based on the other times other posters have cited Vox in here. The fact that Mike Brown robbed the store is
absolutely not up for debate.
I find it chilling how antisocial, how casually criminal, Michael Brown is in that whole robbery thing, to be honest - weirdly, I'd find him more sympathetic if he was some kind of professional robber who planned his robbery fr months. Instead he's just this guy who walks into a store and decides he wants things and doesn't want to pay. He doesn't even hide what he's doing from the clerk - he just bulldozes his way past him. That's what I mean when I say that the more that comes out about Brown and his family, the easier I find it to believe that he really did assault an officer out of nowhere.