On the night of August 9, 2014, a white police officer shot and murdered Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. The murder not only incited nationwide protests, but it also fueled Danez Smith’s emotionally charged “not an elegy for Mike Brown.”

Larry Buchanan et al, journalist for The New York Times, detailed the events of the shooting in real time in the article, “What Happened in Ferguson?” updating the piece on the anniversary of Brown’s death in 2015. Buchanan writes that, in the events leading up to the shooting, Michael Brown and friend, Dorian Johnson, left a local convenience store after stealing some cigarillos. Officer Wilson matched Brown to the description of the theft suspect and confronted the men, leading to an altercation that soon turned deadly.

Witnesses provide inconsistent accounts of Brown’s body language during the shooting. Buchanan reports that:

Some witnesses said Mr. Brown never moved toward Officer Wilson when he was shot and killed. Most of the witnesses said the shots were fired as he moved toward Officer Wilson […] Some witnesses said that Mr. Brown had his hands in the air. Several others said that he did not raise his hands at all or that he raised them briefly, then dropped them and turned toward the officer (“What Happened in Ferguson?”, Larry Buchanan et al, The New York Times (2015)).