Prosecutor: Film's edit of Ferguson video distorts incident

FERGUSON, Mo. -- A prosecutor was critical Monday of store surveillance footage from a new documentary about the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, calling it a heavily edited attempt to distort an incident that occurred hours before Brown died in an encounter with a police officer.

Filmmaker Jason Pollock responded by calling St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch a "master of deception" and standing by the video shown in his documentary "Stranger Fruit."

McCulloch released five surveillance videos from the early hours of Aug. 9, 2014, at Ferguson Market & Liquor he said are unedited and tell a different story than filmmakers suggest.

The footage as it appears in the documentary "was clearly an attempt to distort this and turn it into something it isn't," McCulloch said at a news conference.

He said it was potentially dangerous, setting off a Sunday-night protest of about 100 people that included reports of shots fired and the arrest of a man accused of trying to blow up a police car by putting a napkin in the gas tank and trying to light it. Henry Stokes, 44, was charged Monday with attempting to cause a catastrophe.

On Monday night, a few dozen protesters gathered peacefully outside Ferguson Market while police officers guarded the store.

Pollock said there was no deceptive editing.

"He's trying to make it seem like I did something that I didn't," Pollock said of McCulloch on Monday. "He's a master at deception, I'll give him that, and he tricked the world for a long time, but he can't trick us now. Because anybody who sees that video knows exactly what they see."

Brown, 18, who was black and unarmed, was shot to death shortly after noon Aug. 9, 2014, during a violent encounter with white officer Darren Wilson. Wilson was cleared of wrongdoing by a St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Department of Justice, but the shooting set off months of protests.

Within days of Brown's death, Ferguson police released video from Ferguson Market purporting to show Brown stealing cigarillos from the store before noon. He left the store and was walking on Canfield Drive when Wilson told him to get on the sidewalk and off the street -- the beginning of their fatal confrontation.

The documentary, which premiered Saturday, includes previously unseen surveillance footage showing Brown inside the store at 1:14 a.m., getting what appears to be two drinks from a cooler, then going to the counter and requesting cigarillos. The clerk puts the drinks and cigarillos in a bag.

Brown gives something to a clerk, who appears to sniff it. A second clerk also sniffs what appears to be a small bag. Brown starts to leave but returns to the counter, talks to the clerks and leaves without the bag containing the drinks and cigarillos.

Pollock said he believes the footage shows Brown trading a small amount of marijuana for the cigarillos. Pollock reasons Brown returned 10 hours later to pick up the bag of cigarillos he had set aside earlier -- not to steal cigarillos, as police claimed.

Jay Kanzler, a lawyer for Ferguson Market, said there was no bartered deal between Brown and market workers. Kanzler said Brown offered marijuana for cigarillos, but the workers refused.

The footage, which Kanzler also released, shows a clerk pulling both boxes of cigarillos from the bag after Brown leaves and putting them back on a shelf. Another worker takes the drinks back toward the cooler.

"I didn't edit the exchange," Pollock said. "I decided to end my scene after Michael left the store because after that it is irrelevant what happened to the (cigarillos), and it is irrelevant what they (the clerks) did with them. The exchange is over, they had the weed, and then he decided to leave the store. He did not rob the store."

Pollock said the clerks lied because they didn't want to admit to involvement in a drug deal.

But McCulloch said there was no evidence the workers did anything wrong.

The newly released footage also raised questions about how forthcoming police and prosecutors were about evidence. McCulloch said the earlier encounter involving Brown at the store was noted in a police report released on the night in November 2014 when the grand jury decided not to indict Wilson, who later resigned.

The prosecutor said that video was never released because the incident did not result in any charges and the footage was "immaterial" to what happened later that day.

St. Louis County's NAACP chapter said it's "deeply concerned" about the footage now surfacing.

"Regardless of what was revealed in the video, Michael Brown should have never lost his life," board member John Gaskin III said in a statement. "If the (documentary) video is accurate and valid, it is unfortunate that Brown was portrayed internationally as a 'thief' and 'criminal.' It remains injudicious that so many men of color are racially profiled on an ongoing basis and far too frequently guilty until proven innocent in the United States' criminal justice system."