An expert medical examiner performing an autopsy at the request of the family of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old allegedly shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo., found that he was shot six times, twice in the head and four times in his torso, with all the bullets entering the front of Brown’s body.
The New York Times reported the findings of the examiner, Michael Baden, formerly chief medical examiner for the City of New York. Baden’s illustration of the gunshot wounds:
The local government and the U.S. Justice Department will be performing their own autopsies as well.
The two shots to Brown’s head, Baden said, were likely the last fired and would have stopped Brown immediately, whatever he was doing. Baden found no gunpowder residue on Brown’s body, perhaps suggesting that no shots were fired at close range, but the autopsy didn’t look at Brown’s clothing. Eyewitness accounts of the shooting from civilians have suggested that Brown was first shot while running away from the officer present; this evidence would suggest that may not have been the case.
Baden said that the number of shots fired struck him as somewhat high: ”In my capacity as the forensic examiner for the New York State Police, I would say, ‘You’re not supposed to shoot so many times.’” But he encouraged people not to read too much into the information: “Right now there is too little information to forensically reconstruct the shooting,” he said.
UPDATE: Sources tell the Washington Post that the local-government medical examiner has reached more or less the same conclusion: Brown had six to eight gunshot wounds, all in the front of his body.