Wilson has been living for several months on a nondescript street on the outskirts of St. Louis. He hasn’t read the Justice Department’s report on systemic racism in Ferguson. Photograph by Ryan Pfluger

Darren Wilson, the former police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old African-American, in Ferguson, Missouri, has been living for several months on a nondescript dead-end street on the outskirts of St. Louis. Most of the nearby houses are clad in vinyl siding; there are no sidewalks, and few cars around. Wilson, who is twenty-nine, started receiving death threats not long after the incident, in which Brown was killed in the street shortly after robbing a convenience store. Although Wilson recently bought the house, his name is not on the deed, and only a few friends know where he lives. He and his wife, Barb, who is thirty-seven, and also a former Ferguson cop, rarely linger in the front yard. Because of such precautions, Wilson has been leading a very quiet life. During the past year, a series of police killings of African-Americans across the country has inspired grief, outrage, protest, and acrimonious debate. For many Americans, this discussion, though painful, has been essential. Wilson has tried, with some success, to block it out.

This March, I spent several days at his home. The first time I pulled up to the curb, Wilson, who is six feet four and weighs two hundred and fifteen pounds, immediately stepped outside, wearing a hat and sunglasses. He had seen me arriving on security cameras that are synched to his phone.

Wilson has twice been exonerated of criminal wrongdoing. In November, after a grand jury chose not to indict him, the prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, was widely accused of having been soft on him, in part because McCulloch’s father was a police officer who had been killed in a shootout with a black suspect. In March, the U.S. Department of Justice issued two official reports on Ferguson. One was a painstaking analysis of the shooting that weighed physical, ballistic, forensic, and crime-scene evidence, and statements from purported eyewitnesses. The report cleared Wilson of willfully violating Brown’s civil rights, and concluded that his use of force was defensible. It also contradicted many details that the media had reported about the incident, including that Brown had raised his hands in surrender and had been shot in the back. The evidence supported Wilson’s contention that Brown had been advancing toward him.

The Justice Department also released a broader assessment of the police and the courts in Ferguson, and it was scathing. The town, it concluded, was characterized by deep-seated racism. Local authorities targeted black residents, arresting them disproportionately and fining them excessively. Together, the two reports frustrated attempts to arrive at a clean moral conclusion. Wilson had violated no protocol in his deadly interaction with Brown, yet he was part of a corrupt and racist system.

The federal government’s findings did little to soothe the raw emotions stirred by Brown’s death. Many Americans believe that Wilson need not have killed Brown in order to protect himself, and might not have resorted to lethal force had Brown been white. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his new book, “Between the World and Me,” writing of the psychological impact of incidents like the Brown shooting, says, “It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding.” Coates also notes, “There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country.”

Many police officers have defended Wilson, pointing out that cops patrolling violent neighborhoods risk their lives. Some right-wing publications have lionized him. In The American Thinker, David Whitley wrote that Wilson “should be thanked and treated as a hero!” Supporters raised nearly half a million dollars on behalf of the Wilsons, allowing them to move, buy the new house, and pay their legal expenses. But, as Wilson knows, such support has only deepened the resentment of people who feel that he deserves punishment or, at the very least, reprimand.

During our conversations, Wilson typically sat in a recliner, holding his baby daughter, who was born in March. He said that, after Brown’s death, people “had made threats about doing something to my unborn child.” Wilson, a former Boy Scout with round cheeks and blue eyes, speaks with a muted drawl. When Barb went to the hospital to give birth, he said, “I made her check in anonymously.”

Wilson said that he had interviewed for a few police positions but had been told that he would be a liability. “It’s too hot an issue, so it makes me unemployable,” he said. He tried not to brood about it: “I bottle everything up.”

The baby has helped Wilson, who also has two stepsons, accept the constrictions of his current situation. It has also allowed him to maintain a pointed distance from the furor that the shooting helped to unleash. He told me that he had not read the Justice Department’s report on the systemic racism in Ferguson. “I don’t have any desire,” he said. “I’m not going to keep living in the past about what Ferguson did. It’s out of my control.”

Wilson, who is from Texas, is the son of a woman who repeatedly broke the law. His mother, Tonya Dean, stole money, largely by writing hot checks. After completing high school, she married Wilson’s father, John, who had been her English teacher. They soon had two children to support—Darren and his younger sister, Kara—but Dean spent wildly. She left John Wilson for another man, Tyler Harris, who ran a Y.M.C.A. They had a child, Jared, and Darren and Kara lived with them. “Tonya had me in debt—almost twenty thousand dollars—that first year,” Harris told me. Dean, it seems, often repaid debts to one person by stealing money from someone else.

The family eventually moved to St. Peters, west of St. Louis. When Wilson was thirteen, he stopped trusting his mother altogether, because she stole funds that she had helped raise for his Boy Scout troop. He worried that she would steal what little money he made working summer jobs, so he opened two bank accounts. The first, which had almost no money in it, was a decoy. He put his real earnings in the second, secret account. Wilson also tried to preëmpt his mother’s stealing. Once, he warned a friend’s parents not to let her inside their house, because she would surely find a way to steal their identities and max out their credit cards.

Dean was loving, Wilson said. “She never wanted to hurt us.” He added, “But when it came to money she was going to get it, one way or another.” Dean, who had been told by a psychiatrist that she was bipolar, began engaging in elaborate cons, at one point posing as an heiress poised to inherit millions of dollars.

Despite her compulsive thievery, Dean somehow avoided prison. Finally, a judge warned her that if she appeared in his court again she would be jailed. Shortly afterward, in 2002, she died unexpectedly. At the time, Wilson didn’t understand what had triggered her death, but he now thinks that it might have been suicide. (Harris suspects that she drank antifreeze.)

At the time, Wilson refused to talk about the tragedy, but his family knew that he was struggling: he started skipping school and hanging out with troublemakers. He graduated, though, and began doing construction work in the St. Louis area. He seemed directionless and unhappy. In 2008, the real-estate market crashed, and he could no longer find jobs. He applied to the Eastern Missouri Police Academy and was accepted. Being a police officer, he reasoned, was a recession-proof career.