St. Louis detectives cleared in shootings at restaurant

The Associated Press

ST. LOUIS -- Police officers who shot a drug suspect and his friend outside a St. Louis County Jack in the Box restaurant last year have been cleared of wrongdoing, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Ray Gruender would not comment Wednesday on the yearlong investigation. Civil rights leaders informed of the decision told the newspaper that the federal investigation found no evidence of criminal misconduct by the officers.

Two undercover detectives with the St. Louis County police drug unit fatally shot the two men, both of them black, on June 12, 2000. One man was a drug suspect, and police have said the second was not suspected of any wrongdoing.

Although the men were unarmed, police have said the two tried to escape in a car and run over the officers.

Several black leaders expressed disappointment in the decision.

John Bordeaux, head of the local NAACP, said he had been counting on federal investigators to reach a different conclusion than a local grand jury that decided last year not to indict the officers.

"I would hope that they did not come up with the same kind of results when an innocent man has been killed," Bordeaux said.

Relatives of the slain men -- Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley -- expressed bitter disappointment upon being told that the officers would not be charged.

"They are not going to admit that they have done anything wrong or that they are incompetent," said Beasley's sister, June Beasley.

Local law enforcement officials have said from the start that they were confident the officers would be cleared. They have steadfastly maintained that the officers fired in self-defense.

A state grand jury led by St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch voted in August 2000 not to charge the officers.

After that investigation failed to satisfy some community leaders, the Justice Department stepped in. The federal investigation was a joint effort by the U.S. attorney's office here and Justice's Civil Rights Division in Washington.

In more than a year, neither federal nor state investigators have disclosed the names of the two officers.

The two -- an agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and a detective with Dellwood in North County -- were working with the St. Louis County police drug unit. They planned to arrest Murray, the drug suspect. The attempted arrest occurred on the parking lot of a Jack in the Box in Berkeley.

Authorities have said very little about what happened. What they have said is that Murray and Beasley tried to escape in Murray's car.

Police have said that the car lurched toward the two detectives, who in fear of their lives shot the suspect and his friend.

One lingering question: Why did the detectives choose to shoot instead of standing aside?

County police have said that Murray threw his car into reverse and struck the undercover police vehicle parked behind it. Murray was unable to get away because his rear bumper locked on the front bumper of the police vehicle.

The shooting resulted in unusual secrecy, and black leaders say, contributed to a growing distrust of county police and prosecutors.

The dead men's families say they still want to know what happened.

June Beasley said she was not surprised that federal prosecutors planned no charges. "Why should this case be any different than any other black man being killed by a police officer?"