Police say tests show teen shot by St. Louis officer had gun residue on hands [Vonderrit Myers]

St. Louis (Reuters) - A black teenager fatally shot last week in St. Louis by an off-duty police officer had gunshot residue on his hands, jeans and T-shirt, according to crime lab results released on Tuesday after four days of protests in the city against police violence.

The killing of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers by a white officer last Wednesday intensified the demonstrations over the deadly Aug. 9 shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.

Police said previously that Myers shot at least three times at the off-duty officer who was working with a security company and that Myers' weapon was recovered at the scene. The officer's name has not been released. Family and friends of Myers have said he did not have a gun.

He also shot another kid in the leg when he was sixteen and bound over to adult court. The case was dismissed when the witnessess failed to show, a common occurrence for those who will exact justice on the street.

Hence, the need for him to carry a gun, or at least in his mind.

He was also known as Droop Da Shoota.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frzfC2xFpeU&list=PLfrlsC1yJ2dTGS0GCFaot9rRYJTl1USct

If a cop had popped the kid in the red hiding his face the family could say the gun was planted. It is a RG-22, the type cops used to throw down years ago to “prove” the perp was armed.(average cost back in 1968, $12.00) Yes, twelve dollars.

Those cheap Saturday night specials have not been imported for years!

The “report” that he was “unarmed,” if it refers to the latest thug who was shot is a false, self-serving piece of propaganda by his family and communist agitators, not by the police. It’s also false if it refers to Brown, the earlier deceased thug, since he was fully armed with his fists, with which he had smashed the officer’s face.

citing studies showing young black men are the most likely demographic to be shot by police.

According to the most recent FBI report I've found, cops shoot just over 400 people each year. Of those, just over 300 are white; just over 100 are black. Whites are more at risk than are blacks.

The business about gunshot residue reminded me of some work I did while stationed in Thailand back in the 1960s. One of the problems of dealing with an insurgency is identifying who the insurgents are, when they're at home amongst the bulk of the population. It occurred to me that checking their hands for GSR might be one way of doing it. Could we check a whole village in short order, to identify the insurgents who were hiding amongst the rest of the people? I arranged with the Thai Army to let me test a large group of soldiers, and with the Bangkok Police Department to run the tests.

At that time the standard test was the "paraffin test." A low-melting-point paraffin was painted on the subject's hands, using a paintbrush. When it cooled, it was peeled off like a glove. A reagent was applied to the inside of the "glove" after it had been opened up. If there was GSR present, it would show up as blue specks.

We found that we could indeed run a hundred or more people through the test in a reasonable time, which meant that the test was practical. However, we found that almost every person we tested showed positive results, even though we knew most hadn't fired a gun in weeks. It turned out they hadn't washed their hands in weeks, either. We were simply getting false positives.

Well, so much for that idea. The peasants whom we were trying to distinguish from insurgents probably didn't wash their hands either.

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