This one is worse than Michael Brown

The family of Victor White III. (photo: NBC News/William Widmer)

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

27 August 14

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he shooting death of Michael Brown was more than worth every word and every pixel expended on its coverage. However, for sheer brass-balls police bullshit, what's going on down in New Iberia may be even worse than what happened in Ferguson.

Deputies say they found illegal narcotics on the 22-year-old black man, so he was arrested on possession and taken in for booking. But White's story, the one given five months ago by law enforcement, ends right after his arrival at the sheriff's office, when he's said to have refused to exit the back seat of the deputy's cruiser. The deputy ran for help, and White, in a feat of human elasticity, is alleged to have pulled out a handgun that was somehow undetected during frisking, and with his hands still in cuffs behind his back, fired off a round into his back. White died shortly after, leaving the deputies on the scene as the only witnesses to the incident. The sheriff's office maintains there are no surveillance cameras in that area of the parking lot.

There are so many layers of convenient coincidence atop the official story of Victor White's death that the original story was bound to collapse sooner or later. (No surveillance cameras? The cops frisked a handcuffed man and they were able to find a small amount of marijuana, but they missed a handgun?) Now, though, there is a coroner's report that comes to the unremarkable conclusion that the shooting simply could not have happened the way it was reported.

The autopsy by Christopher Tate, a forensic pathologist with the coroner's office, reveals a number of glaring holes in the deputies' account of White's death, starting with a change in the cause of death from accidental shooting to suicide. The report also shows that White was killed from a gunshot wound that entered the right side of his chest, tearing through his left lung and heart and exiting through his left armpit, leaving the upper arm with lacerations - a much different scenario than the handcuffed man who shot himself in the back as deputies claimed. The autopsy further reveals that White suffered from some sort of blow to the face, listed on the report as two upper facial abrasions near his left eye. In an article posted in the weeks after the shooting, Vice's Cooper reports on a conversation with White's father, Victor White Sr. From that conversation, which came way before the autopsy's release, here's what White says about his son and the deputies who arrested him: "I know they beat him before he arrived at the station, because those who were with him before he was arrested said he didn't have a mark on him."

(Vice is your go-to source on this case. It's been all over it almost from jump.)

While the coroner's report concludes that White committed suicide while in custody, at least it is not claiming that he had to be Mr. Fantastic to do it. White's family isn't buying a word of it, including the coroner's conclusion that this was a suicide. From here, the whole scenario as presented looks like it owes more to Arlen Specter's work with the Warren Commission than it does to anything else. In terms of complete implausibility, this one may be even worse than what happened in Ferguson but, on a number of tragically important levels, they're both the same event.