After a week of riots, protests, and ongoing police brutality in Ferguson, an autopsy of Michael Brown‘s death has been released. With the details of the shooting clouded in so much controversy, many have been clamoring for the report, with hopes that it will provide some insight into Brown’s death at the hands of Darren Wilson.
According to Dr. Michael Baden, who conducted the autopsy, Brown was shot four times in the right arm from the front, and shot twice in the head with one of the bullets entering the top of his head. Baden is a New York renowned medical examiner who performed autopsies on Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as President John F. Kennedy. At 80-years-old, Dr. Baden has performed over 20,000 autopsies throughout his career.
Dr. Baden was flown to Missouri per request of the Brown family to move forward with a separate autopsy. In light of the large amount of attention to Michael Brown’s case, Dr. Baden waived his standard $10,000 fee.
The separate autopsy was accompanied by some striking comments from Dr. Baden, who said:
“People have been asking: How many times was he shot? This information could have been released on Day 1. They [didn’t] do that, even as feelings built up among the citizenry that there was a cover-up. We are hoping to alleviate that.”
Dr. Baden also said that amongst the six shots that Mike Brown was hit with, one of the bullets shattered his right eye, went through his face, exited via his jaw, then hitting his collarbone after. The final two shots were the last fired and would have taken him down.
The key statement made by Dr. Baden was in reference to the amount of shots the officer made:
“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. Right now there is too little information to forensically reconstruct the shooting.”