Page:DOJ Report on Shooting of Michael Brown.djvu/77

 Federal prosecutors asked Witness 148 why she chose not report to the FBI or the SLCPD, since her distrust was specific to the FPD. Witness 148 explained that she did not know that either of those agencies was investigating, despite the fact that she went to Ferguson everyday for three months and admittedly, read media reports about the shooting in the hours, days, and weeks after it occurred.

Witness 148 has felony convictions including conviction for a crime of dishonesty that would be admissible in federal court as impeachment evidence. Her account is inconsistent with the physical and forensic evidence, inconsistent with undisputed facts, i.e. Brown and Witness 101 were in fact walking in the middle of the street, and she admittedly did not see portions of the incident based on her vantage point and because she was protecting her child from gunfire. Similar to Witness 140, even if Witness 148 was present on Canfield Drive on August 14, 2014, and saw parts of the incident, Witness 148's account is inherently unreliable and subject to extensive cross-examination based on how she obtained her information and what motivated her to come forward. She did not report what she witnessed for nearly seven months without any reasonable explanation for the delay, giving her ample opportunity to research the facts in the form of media stories and county grand jury transcripts; she has an apparent distrust of the police (she told federal prosecutors at the outset of her interview that she "didn't trust police at all"); she is upset that “Darren Wilson got away” with what she believes to be a crime and then subsequently engaged in months of protests, but yet she failed to report it to the FBI, not because of distrust, but because she was unaware of the federal investigation. This is difficult to reconcile in light of both her daily visits to Ferguson while the FBI was canvassing the area and her regular internet searches about the shooting. For these reasons, federal prosecutors did not credit her account and could not rely upon it to support a prosecution of Darren Wilson.

Throughout the course of the two investigations, FBI agents and SLCPD detectives both jointly and independently monitored social media, print media, and local and national television broadcasts and news reports in an effort to locate potential witnesses and sources of information. Investigators tracked down several individuals who, via the aforementioned media, claimed to have witnessed Wilson shooting Brown as Brown held his hands up in clear surrender. All of these purported witnesses, upon being interviewed by law enforcement, acknowledged that they did not actually witness the shooting, but rather repeated what others told them in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

For example, one individual publicly posted a description of the shooting during a Facebook chat, explaining that Brown "threw his hands up in the air" as Wilson shot him dead. A Twitter user took a screenshot of the description and "tweeted" it throughout the social media site. When the SLCPD and the FBI interviewed the individual who made the initial post, he explained that he "gave a brief description of what [he] was hearing from the people that were outside" on Canfield Drive, but he did not witness the incident itself. Similarly, another individual publicly "tweeted" about the shooting as though he had just witnessed it, even though he had not.

Likewise, another individual appeared on a television program and discussed the shooting as if he had seen it firsthand. When law enforcement interviewed him, he explained that it was a