The overlooked audiotape of the Michael Brown shooting

So far overlooked in all recent Brown media coverage, however, is an important piece of evidence: an audiotape of the Brown shooting. The grand jury listened to the tape, giving them incontrovertible evidence about the timing of the shots. Yet the audiotape does not appear to have been among the documents released by the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. As a result, the tape has been ignored in discussion about the grand jury’s decision. But the audiotape — combined with the forensic evidence from the scene — provides powerful corroboration of Officer Wilson’s testimony that Michael Brown was charging him.

The basic outlines of the Michael Brown shooting are well known. (Interested readers can also review my posts on Officer Wilson’s testimony, the physical evidence, Witness 10′s testimony, and Dorian Johnson’s implausible story.) A critical point of dispute has been whether Michael Brown was “charging” towards Officer Wilson, as several highly credible witnesses (such as Witness 10) testified. To determine the speed with which Brown was moving toward Officer Wilson, two data points are required: the distance over which he moved and the time it took for him to cover that distance. Speed = distance ÷ time.

Let’s turn first to the time involved in the shooting. Here’s where the overlooked audiotaped evidence comes in. As first reported by CNN, at exactly the time Brown was shot, a man was using a streaming video technology, called Glide, to record a message to his girlfriend. You can listen to the actual message here and can hear 10 apparent shots in the background. The message was sent at 12:02:14 p.m. (Central Daylight Time) on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2014. Once sent and recorded on Glide’s servers, a time stamp blocked editing or other alterations.