DAILY BEAST
by Matt Lewis
October 25, 2014

We’re only now starting to learn what happened the day Michael Brown was shot. But how much will the truth really matter at this point? It’s time we admit something: Increasingly, it’s starting to look like Officer Darren Wilson acted appropriately that fateful day in Ferguson.

Now, until now, I have not weighed in on the Michael Brown shooting—except peripherally. I wrote about how it made conservatives lose faith in the police, discussed the temptation for journalists to become part of the story they are covering, and suggested the media’s incessant coverage might have fanned the Ferguson flames. But even for someone like me—a commentator whose job description includes prematurely weighing in on any issue that captures the nation’s attention—the fundamental question of culpability was never an easy one. It always felt like a “he said he said” situation—with ideological tribalism, not evidence, guiding us to assume our positions on our respective sides. So I avoided it.

Frankly, we still don’t know enough to say conclusively what happened the day Brown was shot. But it’s no longer absurd to speculate. As the official autopsy report obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch demonstrates, Brown was shot in the hand at close range—with gunpowder residue in the wound. Both findings seem to buttresses Wilson’s contention that there was a struggle over the officer’s pistol. Additionally, a forensic pathologist interviewed by the paper noted that “the autopsy did not support witnesses who have claimed Brown was shot while running away from Wilson, or with his hands up.”

And there’s more: The Washington Post is now reporting that “more than a half-dozen unnamed black witnesses have provided testimony to a St. Louis County grand jury that largely supports Wilson’s account of events of Aug. 9,” according to “several people familiar with the investigation.”……

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