In Baltimore on Friday, the state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that her office was charging six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, which, she said, the city medical examiner had determined was a homicide. The most serious charges range from second-degree “depraved-heart” murder, for Officer Caesar Goodson, to involuntary manslaughter, for Officer William Porter, Lieutenant Brian Rice, and Sergeant Alicia White, and second-degree assault, for Officers Edward Nero and Garret Miller. Goodson was also charged with vehicular manslaughter and Miller with wrongful imprisonment. All six were charged with misconduct in office. By mid-afternoon, six of the officers were in custody. A lawyer for the police union, who told reporters he was speaking on their behalf, said he believed they would “be vindicated as they’ve done nothing wrong.”

Why, exactly, did Freddie Gray die? That has not yet been explained in detail, because the scene of the crime was an enclosed metal box in the back of a police van. On April 12th, at around 8:45 A.M., the police “made eye contact” with Gray, who was twenty-five, in the street near Baltimore’s Gilmor Homes housing project. For whatever reason, he ran. The officers chased and caught him, held him down, and put him in the van, and a forty-five-minute ride later he was near death, having suffered massive spinal injuries. One task for prosecutors in a trial will be to match his injuries to the means of force that harmed him. For example, there is a wound that may have occurred when he was already unconscious, handcuffed and without a seat belt—a violation of department policies—and his head hit an exposed bolt. Mosby said that the medical examiner had connected the lack of a restraint to the spinal injuries that killed him. She emphasized that there had been five opportunities to put a seat belt on Gray, but they were ignored. Instead, at one stop, the officers put ankle shackles on him and put him back in the van, belly down on the floor.

The image of Gray’s inert body left to bounce around in the back of the van is one of the many that have contributed to the rage in Baltimore this week. Mosby is married to a Baltimore city councilman, and she has strong connections to leaders in both the city government and the black community. (In addition, the Washington Post noted, “Her mother, her grandfather and two of her uncles were Boston police officers.”) On Friday, Mosby said that her office had begun its work on the day Gray was injured, but there were no good answers a week later, when he died, or in the week that followed, which saw too much violence and unrest in Baltimore. When the police gave Mosby their own report, she said, “We ask for the public to remain patient and peaceful and to trust the process of the justice system.” But there wasn’t much time left.

Still, the one development that made the filing of criminal charges against the six officers necessary, if not inevitable, was not the disorder in the city, as alarming and as tragic as that has been. It was the news, on Thursday, that the police van that carried Gray to his death had made a stop that the officers involved had never disclosed. What was known was bad enough: the van had stopped three times, and Gray, while he still could, had said he was having trouble breathing and had asked for medical help, which he wasn’t given. But investigators, scanning security footage from cameras that happened to be trained on the streets that the van passed through, discovered a fourth stop. This threw into question everything that the officers had said about the ride—and there had already been cause for skepticism. In the original charging document, filed on the day of his arrest, one officer wrote that Gray had been taken into custody “without force or incident,” despite the fact that a cell-phone video showed that this was not so: he was screaming in pain and dragging his feet, and appeared to bystanders to be injured. In another document, obtained by the Washington Post, police claimed that a second prisoner in the back of the van, who could not see Gray because the two were separated by a metal divider, heard sounds that made him think that Gray was rhythmically banging himself against the walls in an effort to injure himself. That scenario was not entirely plausible, logically or physically: Gray died, after a week in a coma, because his spine was nearly severed and his vertebrae were crushed, major injuries that are not consistent with mischievous self-harm. (Indeed, the other prisoner, Donta Allen, has since disputed the official account, telling a local television station that the police were “trying to make it seem like I told them that, I made it like Freddie Gray did that to his self. Why the [bleep] would he do that to his self?”) These claims were made in official police statements and records. If the public couldn’t rely on their truth, there was all the more need for a trial in open court.

Police are given a great deal of credit and leeway. We let them lock people up, and we let them carry guns and shoot people with them. And, because they are the ones who have to work on dark streets and in metal boxes in the backs of vans, we often give them the benefit of the doubt about what happens there. When they lie, it is broadly corrosive.

A man like Freddie Gray would not get that sort of benefit of the doubt, even—or especially—in death. In one of the bitter moments from this week, conservative Web sites circulated court papers that, they claimed, suggested Gray had recently been injured in some other way, perhaps in a car crash, and that, in effect, the police had just come across him at the wrong moment, when his spine was already badly damaged. That wouldn’t explain the chase before his arrest, but never mind—as the Baltimore Sun reported, those court papers were actually about a settlement for Gray’s poisoning by lead paint, years earlier, when he was a young boy. His sister was poisoned, too. Lead-paint injuries, one of the underexamined blights of poor neighborhoods, lead to long-term medical issues, academic trouble, and, in some cases, problems with decision-making. The legal papers were an effort on the part of the Gray siblings to trade in their settlement, which would have been paid beginning in 2024, for a smaller amount paid sooner. That is the sort of choice that can seem financially improvident only if one has never been desperate to pay a bill or lived, as this family did, in a neighborhood starved of economic opportunity. It is a particular cruelty that Gray’s childhood poisoning would be used not as a route to talk about the larger crisis of Baltimore but to encourage falsehoods about how he died.

And, on Friday, Mosby said that another claim had been false. The police said that the reason they had taken Gray into custody, and stuffed him into the back of the van, was that he was carrying a spring-operated knife—a switchblade—which can be illegal within Baltimore city limits. But, Mosby said, the knife in Gray’s pocket “was not a switchblade” or anything unlawful. There had never been probable cause to arrest him. There was, instead, probable cause for a charge of murder.