The parents of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager whom police officer Darren Wilson shot dead in Ferguson, Mo., in August, have denounced Wilson’s first public comments, calling them “crazy” and saying they add “insult to injury.”
On Nov. 25, two days after a grand jury’s decision not to indict him in Brown’s death sparked nationwide protests, Wilson broke months of silence in a primetime interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, telling him, “I have a clean conscience…because know I did my job right.”
Officer Wilson, who is reportedly planning to resign, told Stephanopoulos that he feared for his life in his confrontation with Brown, saying he felt like “a five-year-old fighting Hulk Hogan.”
When Brown’s parents appeared on NBC’s Today on Wednesday morning, Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., told Savannah Guthrie that Wilson’s version of the story sounded “crazy.”
Today Show/NBC
“Who in their right mind,” Brown Sr. asked, “would rush or charge at a police officer that had his gun drawn?”
Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, said Wilson’s comments added “insult to injury.”
McSpadden also defended her husband and Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, after video footage emerged of him calling on the crowd to “burn this bitch down!”
“He was just emotional,” McSpadden argued. “I don’t feel that he stirred the crowd, the crowd was already stirred, it’s been stirring since August 9,” the date of Brown’s death.
Today Show/NBC
Asked what the Brown family will do now that the grand jury has declined to indict officer Wilson, family attorney Benjamin Crump said they plan to “[exhaust] every legal avenue possible to give them some sense of justice.”
The family is also pushing for the introduction of a so-called “Michael Brown law” to require police officers to wear video cameras at all times.
H/T Today | Photo via hirotomo t/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0) | Remix by Jason Reed