Dorian Johnson: A Year After Mike Brown's Death, He's Still Grappling With the Fallout...

[stringer bell]

Indeed, various conspiracy theorists and right-wing blogs had latched onto Johnson, fixating on his testimony and his role in the creation of the "Hands Up; Don't Shoot" narrative. His TV interviews were collected and uploaded as YouTube compilation videos, which users picked over for proof of his deceptions. He was dubbed a "serial liar," and much worse. His Facebook inbox filled up with apoplectic rants and veiled threats. He stopped Googling his name.

He'd become a public figure, merely by virtue of what he'd witnessed. In December, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Johnson had landed a temporary job with St. Louis city, as a forestry worker. The story was published before he could even log his first day on the job.

"At the time I was working there, there were incidents where cars were following me to work," Johnson says. "I can't walk out of my house without someone I don't know knowing me. They ask me for autographs, pictures, hugs, can I come to their church. I've been invited to meet people's families. I speak to anyone who speak to me, and it's good and bad. You can't really trust someone you don't know."

After the temporary city job ended, Johnson landed a full-time gig as a server in The Kitchen Sink, a cajun restaurant in the Central West End. Things seemed to be getting back to normal.

It wasn't until the spring of 2015 that he suddenly found himself back in the spotlight -- for something that seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of his detractors.

Johnson grew up in the northwest St. Louis neighborhood of Walnut Park, which is almost entirely black. It's there, he says, that he learned how police and black males interact in the real world.

"When you've been born in an urban environment, you don't have to be taught," he says. "That's kind of been my life St. Louis, head on a swivel. You see with your eyes how the police handle somebody else."

Raised by a single mother, Johnson grew up in a house his mother shared with his aunt and her children. It was a chaotic childhood, but instead of joining a gang, Johnson took his competitive streak to the football field -- as a member of the St. Louis recreation division's Junior Rams. Despite his small stature (he's now a slender five feet seven inches), Johnson reveled in showing off his speed on the field. He traveled across the country with the team.

But in 2007, a shootout erupted as Johnson was getting off a school bus. Doctors were unable to remove the bullet embedded near a vein in his leg. That was the end of his football career.

Johnson graduated high school. But his first year at a historically black college in Jefferson City, Lincoln University, ended with his 2011 arrest for stealing a backpack. After returning to St. Louis, Johnson landed a job with MetroLink and proudly moved into his own apartment in Ferguson, in the Canfield Green apartment complex. That's where a mutual friend introduced him to Michael Brown in March 2014, just five months before his death.

Dorian's younger brother Damonte had a different upbringing. Damonte spent much of his early years living with godparents in St. Louis County. He attended Chaminade College Prep, an elite Catholic high school in suburban Creve Coeur, and at eighteen moved to Maryland to attend the University of Baltimore, where he says he excelled academically.

Both brothers, though, watched things fall apart in 2012, after D'Angelo, their youngest sibling, died in a drag-racing accident. He was sixteen.

After his little brother's death, Damonte's grades plummeted. He says he couldn't focus on his classes. After a disappointing semester he moved back to Missouri.

"A part of me died with our little brother, and that's been the main thing myself and my family has been trying to overcome," says Damonte. "Dorian and I had always been close, but after that no one knew how to behave or how to react or how to treat an everyday situation. We were at each other's necks and just going at it, and it could be over the smallest thing."

The intervening years softened the tension between them, but didn't heal the rift. That wouldn't happen until nearly a year after Brown's shooting made Dorian Johnson a national name - on May 6, when Damonte, Dorian and their half-brother, Otis McRoberts, were arrested during a block party in north city.

According to court records, someone called the police to report that a group had gathered on the 5700 block of Acme Avenue, and that they might have guns or knives. When the first patrol car arrived, the two Johnsons and McRoberts were part of a crowd of about fifteen people hanging out on the sidewalk.

"They came like they already knew somebody was going to jail," Dorian Johnson says. "Me and my brothers just standing there, like, 'OK, we're not doing nothing, so I'm not finna run and make it seem like we're doing something.' So we just stood there."

Dorian and Damonte Johnson both say at least five more patrol cars pulled up, but it wasn't until an officer grabbed McRoberts -- investigating "a bulge in his waistband which I believed could possibly be a concealed gun," as the officer would later write in his report -- that things got out of hand.

"That kind of sent a shock to my brother Damonte," Dorian Johnson says. "He wasn't used to seeing police do stuff like that. I'm used to it, but Damonte grabbed both of them."

What ensued was a kind of tug-of-war between Damonte Johnson, the officer and McRoberts. More officers arrived to pull Damonte off.

"After they put the handcuffs on me," says Damonte, "Dorian became more irate. They slammed him on the ground, ripped his pants and messed up his shoulder." In the end, all three brothers were hauled off to the City Justice Center in downtown St. Louis.

No weapons were found in McRobert's waistband. But the arrests were leaked to the media immediately, and Dorian and Damonte's mugshots were blasted over the internet. Citing anonymous police sources, the Post-Dispatch reported that officers had also recovered "cough medication mixed with what police believe to be an illegal narcotic" from a cup Dorian Johnson had supposedly discarded at the scene.

It only took a day for the rumored drug possession charge to evaporate. The cup tested negative for drugs.

"A drug charge was brought to our office," Lauren Trager, a spokeswoman for the circuit attorney's office, said at the time. "It was refused by our office."

The brothers weren't home free. Both Johnsons were hit with a charge for resisting arrest, and Damonte faced an added charge of third-degree assault against a police officer.

 

[stringer bell]

In the Justice Center, word quickly spread: Dorian Johnson -- yes, that Dorian Johnson -- was locked up.

"We had gang unit come down and take pictures of us, and it started a kind of a buzz. So now we get umpteen different officers coming down," Dorian Johnson remembers. "We had two officers come down and look through the window and smirk and laugh. We had a couple officers just coming and pointing. I was telling my brothers, 'Don't pay them no mind, we'll be alright.'

"There was this young officer, he said, 'I had to buy new guns because of you and Mike Brown. You guys ruined my whole vacation, and my whole summer.'"

Damonte Johnson also remembers a parade of curious officers approaching the holding cell.

"The first two days we were in there, it was absolutely horrible. It wasn't an inmate that was a problem, it was all the [corrections officers]. It was this constant, 'This ain't Ferguson, you ain't get no money out of here, fuck you, we're going to fuck you up.' "It was vulgar and in your face," he adds, "almost like they were trying to bait us."

Although McRoberts, the youngest of the three brothers, was released on bond after a few days, the Johnsons were left to stew in an eight-by-ten cell with more than a dozen other men.

One night, Damonte says, around 3 a.m., one of their cellmates woke up vomiting and defecating all over himself. When the guards took him away, they left the puke and shit behind in the cell.

Dorian objected, asking one of the guards to clean up the mess.

"At this point Dorian gets off the floor, walking toward the C.O. Dorian is just standing there, and that made the C.O. even more mad," Damonte says. "The guard was screaming out our home address, 'I'll be waiting outside your house, I'm going to take my badge off and beat you.'"

But along with the tension came a chance for reconciliation. More than three years after the fact, D'Angelo's death still hung between the pair.

"We had one of those big brother-to-brother talks, letting all our feeling out in this cell," Dorian says.

"We both wanted to be good for our mom. We both want to take care of our family. We were trying to do it on our own."

After D'Angelo died, the brothers had sparred over who would step up, be the man and fix the wounds in their family. Damonte wanted to take more responsibility, and he felt disrespected by Dorian's overbearing attitude as the family's eldest son, the protector.

"We found each other in that place, we found what it meant to be brothers again," Damonte says. "Both of us had been just wrecks after losing our little brother, always doubting ourselves, just messing up and being real tough on ourselves. When we sat down and talked, it was crazy how much we saw eye to eye. He wanted the same thing that I did. He wanted to make it, to do something, to bring the family up and out of this."

Damonte left the Justice Center after five days, while Dorian was shipped to City Workhouse jail for another two days before his own release. A few days later, Dorian lost his job at The Kitchen Sink. The staff, he says, disliked his notoriety and the attention the recent arrest had brought him.

"This whole incident was excessive use of force against Dorian's brothers," says attorney Williams - who says the treatment only escalated once the officers realized who Dorian was.

But both Dorian and Damonte say the time spent in Justice Center brought them closer.

"The surprising thing was that we said we loved each other, for the first time in maybe five years," Damonte says. "Now we always get off the phone with 'I love you, bro. Stay safe.'"

Dorian Johnson has found little peace in the year since Brown's death. He lost his apartment, his job and his independence. He also became a national whipping boy after a U.S. Department of Justice report concluded that physical evidence and witness testimony supported Wilson's version of events, rather than his own.

In a column titled "'Hands Up; Don't Shoot,' was built on a lie," Washington Post opinion writer Jonathan Capehart, who is black, wrote that the DOJ report made him ill.

"Wilson knew about the theft of the cigarillos from the convenience store and had a description of the suspects," Capehart wrote. "Brown fought with the officer and tried to take his gun. And the popular hands-up storyline, which isn't corroborated by ballistic and DNA evidence and multiple witness statements, was perpetuated by Witness 101. In fact, just about everything said to the media by Witness 101, whom we all know as Dorian Johnson, the friend with Brown that day, was not supported by the evidence and other witness statements."

Similar arguments metastasized across social media and blogs. And while Capehart concluded his column by emphasizing the serious issues raised by Brown's death and the Ferguson protests, a vast array of naysayers used the same argument to dismiss the entire Black Lives Matter movement as a lie.

As for Johnson, the only major change in his testimony occurred during the grand jury hearings, when he clarified that he did not actually see Wilson shoot Brown in the back, only that Brown appeared to jerk and halt in the same instant that Wilson fired a shot at the fleeing teenager.

Otherwise, Johnson remains steadfast in his testimony -- that Brown was murdered on that street with his hands raised.

Unsurprisingly, he's still bitter about the grand jury decision.

"It seems like the prosecutor got what he wanted -- a non-indictment, and slowly everything is quieting down, kind of just being swept under the rug," he says, and the hurt is clear on his face. "People are out here trying to get to the bottom of it still, trying to get the clear, correct story. The story that's going to add up, because the story that Darren Wilson told does not add up."

Johnson's testimony lives on, however, in the form of lawsuits. In April, Michael Brown's family filed a wrongful death suit against the City of Ferguson, Wilson and former police chief Thomas Jackson. The suit draws heavily from Johnson's statements, including how Wilson allegedly yelled "get the fuck off the street" before reversing his vehicle to block Brown from walking, and how Brown "raised his arms in a non-threatening matter" before Wilson's fatal shots.

Johnson has his own lawsuit pending against the same defendants. He's seeking at least $100,000 in compensation for "psychological injury, severe emotional distress, medical expenses, lost wages, living expenses [and] incurred additional expenses." The prospect of a monetary windfall, however, seems small comfort in light of how things have shaken out.

No matter how much Johnson has shunned the spotlight in the last eight months, the nation's interest in him continues to border on tabloid obsession. And that, he believes, is in stark contrast to the third man on Canfield Drive that hot day last August - the man he believes bears responsibility for his friend's death and everything that followed.

"It does sadden me that it seems like Darren Wilson just fell off the face of the earth," he says. "I mean, I can pick my nose and it'll be on the news. Who's to say what Darren Wilson is doing right now?"[/b]

 

[a.mann]

He should be feeling some type of way for falsely starting and then going all over the major news networks with that whole Mike had "hands up" and he was shot in the back....

That shit didn't do us any favors in credibility

 

[h8rhurta]

Fuck Darren Wilson and his concocted and scripted version AND everyone that believes that bullshit.