But a forensics expert says Brown’s official county autopsy suggests the teenager may not have had his hands raised after all when he was slain on Aug. 9, according to a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist in San Francisco who reviewed the autopsy for the Post-Dispatch, told the paper that one of the officer’s shots hit Brown’s forearm and traveled from the back of the arm to the inner arm, which means Brown’s palms could not have been facing Wilson, as some witnesses have said. That trajectory shows Brown probably was not taking a standard surrender position with arms above the shoulders and palms out when he was shot outside the officer’s car, she said.
Neither the St. Louis County medical examiner or her assistant, who conducted the autopsy, was reached for comment by the paper.
Melinek also told the newspaper another bullet struck Brown at close range — and may at that point have been reaching for Wilson’s weapon. The autopsy found material “consistent with products that are discharged from the barrel of a firearm” in a wound on Brown’s thumb. Melinek said this “supports the fact that this guy is reaching for the gun, if he has gunpowder particulate material in the wound.”
