A new video has come to light possibly showing that Michael Brown did not rob a convenience store as has been widely accepted,but instead took part in a drug deal with clerks.
Filmmaker Jason Pollock shared a copy of the clip with the New York Times as part of a teaser for his new documentary about the Mike Brown case, titled Stranger Fruit.
The video takes place 11 hours before Brown was shot and killed by a white police officer.
According to police spokesman Sergeant Shawn McGuire, the video was never previously released because it was not relevant to the case. Though he later told DailyMail.com that, “The incident is still irrelevant to our investigation because our department investigated the encounter between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson.”
In the footage, Brown appears to be giving a small bag, purportedly containing marijuana, to the employees, who give him two boxes of cigarillos in return. The teen starts to walk away with them but then comes back and returns it to one of the clerks behind the counter.
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Pollock and the victim’s mother feel that this shows there was an understanding between the clerks and the teen and that he never stole the cigarillos.
“I was surprised to hear that two years later, there was a video,” Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden told Pollock in the documentary.
“What you’re going to see on this video is what they didn’t show us happened, that clarifies that there was an understanding. There was some type of exchange, for one thing, for another,” McSpadden went on.
Pollock is challenging the police account of the day’s events, though the convenience store and the employees have denied the filmmaker’s account.
Their lawyer, Jay Kanzler, has stated, “There was no transaction, there was no understanding. No agreement. Those folks didn’t sell him cigarillos for pot. The reason he gave it back is he was walking out the door with unpaid merchandise and they wanted it back.”