On the credibility of a Ferguson witness

In case you need to argue with some dumbass on the internet or family member at holiday dinner about Ferguson, you should really review the saga of Witness 40.

The DA in the case let this dumpsterfire lying ass racist psycho go up before the Grand Jury and perjure herself. This is, apparently, where the “charging like a football player” bullshit came from. Important, because this particular claim is important to justify why Wilson shot Brown in the top of the head- the alternative account is that Brown was already falling on his face when Wilson shot him in the top of the head as some sort of coup de grace.

The smoking gun report:

DECEMBER 15–The grand jury witness who testified that she saw Michael Brown pummel a cop before charging at him “like a football player, head down,” is a troubled, bipolar Missouri woman with a criminal past who has a history of making racist remarks and once insinuated herself into another high-profile St. Louis criminal case with claims that police eventually dismissed as a “complete fabrication,” The Smoking Gun has learned.

Oh, how so?

Sandra McElroy did not provide police with a contemporaneous account of the Brown-Wilson confrontation, which she claimed to have watched unfold in front of her as she stood on a nearby sidewalk smoking a cigarette.

Instead, McElroy (seen at left) waited four weeks after the shooting to contact cops. By the time she gave St. Louis police a statement on September 11, a general outline of Wilson’s version of the shooting had already appeared in the press. McElroy’s account of the confrontation dovetailed with Wilson’s reported recollection of the incident.

How convenient. Wait, why was she even there in the first place?

Before testifying about the content of her notebook scribblings, McElroy admitted that she had not driven to Ferguson in search of an African-American pal she had last seen in 1988. Instead, McElroy offered a substitute explanation that was, remarkably, an even bigger lie.

McElroy, again under oath, explained to grand jurors that she was something of an amateur urban anthropologist. Every couple of weeks, McElroy testified, she likes to “go into all the African-American neighborhoods.” During these weekend sojourns–apparently conducted when her ex has the kids–McElroy said she will “go in and have coffee and I will strike up a conversation with an African-American and I will try to talk to them because I’m trying to understand more.”

Sure.

The opening entry in McElroy’s journal on the day Brown died declared, “Well Im gonna take my random drive to Florisant. Need to understand the Black race better so I stop calling Blacks Niggers and Start calling them People.” A commendable goal, indeed.

What a peach of a person she is.

Shaun King at Daily Kos:

Sean Hannity, with a popular drive-time radio show and highly rated prime-time television broadcast, is one of the two or three most important voices in conservative America. Love him or hate him, what he says matters to millions of Americans. What he says over and over again, particularly to an audience that often sees him as a primary source of news, actually matters a great deal. While he may not shape culture for you, he shapes and informs culture for millions of Americans.

This is why, among many reasons, it is so troubling that he regularly quotes and leans on one particular “witness” in the August 9 shooting death of Ferguson teenager Mike Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. This so-called witness, a middle-aged white woman, known only to us as “Witness #40,” openly stated to FBI investigators a litany of bizarre and disturbing facts about herself, including that she regularly calls African Americans “niggers and apes,” helped start a support group for Darren Wilson encouraging kids to make him Christmas cards, and that she only happened to be on Canfield Drive—which is not even in the town she lives in—the exact moment Darren Wilson killed Mike Brown, on a whim “to understand the black race better so I can stop calling Blacks niggers and start calling them people.”

And it wasn’t just Hannity either. It was the DA. More Shaun King at Daily Kos:

Sandy McElroy was never near Canfield Drive on August 9. She completely fabricated her entire story weeks after Darren Wilson killed Mike Brown. During their interrogation of her, Sandy McElroy was completely shredded by the FBI as a racist, a liar, unstable, and more. They proved in their own interview, with evidence, that McElroy lied about ever being there, about how she left the scene, about key details of the case that she claimed she witnessed, and more.

Furthermore, Sandy McElroy, beyond being a convicted felon, had a record in St. Louis of interfering with investigations and making preposterous claims about connections she had to cold cases. All of this was known to St. Louis officials. Her extreme racism was not private, but public, and was discussed at great length with the FBI before she was ever allowed to testify before the grand jury.

You must understand, then, that Sandy McElroy, whose testimony matches that of Darren Wilson’s better than any witness who testified, was only called to the grand jury, not once, but twice, and allowed to present concocted physical evidence at that, because she was a neutron bomb for this case. Not ONE PIECE OF EVIDENCE proving that she was there could be found and scores of evidence that she made the entire thing up was presented weeks before she was ever allowed to testify before the grand jury, but it was all deliberately ignored.

So yeah. When you run up against some Klown that wants to explain to you about “credible” testimony and how the DA and the Grand Jury process was all on the up and up, you go ahead and ask them about Witness 40.