A year after fatally shooting Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Mo., Darren Wilson says he and his wife and baby daughter have to be careful when they go out.

“We try to go somewhere — how do I say this correctly? — with like-minded individuals,” Wilson told the New Yorker for an extensive profile published online Monday. “You know. Where it’s not a mixing pot.”

The 29-year-old former Ferguson police officer, who received death threats following the 18-year-old’s death on Aug. 9, 2014, lives in relative seclusion on the outskirts of St. Louis.

Wilson, who was not indicted in Brown’s killing, told the magazine’s Jake Halpern he hadn’t reflected much on who Brown was because he had been preoccupied with the waves of protests in Ferguson and the civil lawsuit Brown’s parents filed against him in May.

“You do realize that his parents are suing me?” Wilson said. “So I have to think about him.”

He added: “Do I think about who he was as a person? Not really, because it doesn’t matter at this point. Do I think he had the best upbringing? No. Not at all.”

Later, Wilson was asked if he thought Brown was a “bad guy,” or “just a kid who had got himself into a bad situation.”

“I only knew him for those forty-five seconds in which he was trying to kill me,” Wilson said. “So I don’t know.”

Halpern also detailed some of Wilson’s and his wife's thoughts in the immediate aftermath of the shooting:







At the Ferguson police station, Barb Wilson wondered why her husband hadn’t showed up for lunch. Then, she told me, “he just walked in and was, like, ‘I just killed somebody.’” Barb noticed that Wilson’s “face was flushed and red — it didn’t look right.” She decided that he needed space and, not knowing what else to do, took care of some paperwork. Wilson went to the hospital with his superiors, and debriefed them while he was examined for injuries. He returned to the station, and he and Barb headed home.



“Neither one of us knew what the reaction was going to be the next day,” Wilson said. “You know, a typical police shooting is: you get about a week to a week and a half off, you see a shrink, you go through your Internal Affairs interviews. And then you come back.” Barb told me, “I didn’t think it would be a big weight on his shoulders. This is kind of what we signed up for.”



Later that night, however, they turned on the television and watched live coverage of unrest in Ferguson. Barb recalled, “We stayed up all night watching, like, ‘Oh, my God—what’s going on? What are they doing?’”



Barb’s younger son, who was then six, asked why there were images on television of Ferguson burning. Wilson told me, “I said, ‘Well, I had to shoot somebody.’ And he goes, ‘Well, why did you shoot him? Was he a bad guy?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he was a bad guy.’”



[...]



A few days after the shooting, the Wilsons, worried that their address was about to be leaked online, fled to the house of a relative: “We ran through the house, grabbed all our guns, and put some bags together.” Wilson contemplated leaving St. Louis for good, then reconsidered. He told me, “At least here I’d know where I’m welcome and not welcome.”





















Story continues



In March, the Justice Department issued a scathing report on the city of Ferguson, concluding that “a culture of systemic racial bias” permeated the police department.



But Wilson said he has not read the report.

“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.”

In 2009, when Wilson was in police training in Jennings, a predominantly black town bordering Ferguson, he admitted to a field officer that he felt out of place.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he recalled saying. “This is a culture shock. Would you help me? Because you obviously have that connection, and you can relate to them. You may be white, but they still respect you. So why can they respect you and not me?”

But Wilson said race did not play a part in his shock.

“I never looked at it like ‘I’m the only white guy here.’ I just looked at it as ‘This isn’t where I grew up,’” he said. “When a cop shows up, it’s, like, ‘The cops are here!’ There’s no ‘Oh, s---, the white cops are here!’”

“Everyone is so quick to jump on race,” Wilson continued. “It’s not a race issue.”

In late November, five days after the grand jury's decision not to indict him was announced, Wilson resigned from the Ferguson police force. He told the magazine that he’s interviewed for a few police positions, but the Brown case is “too hot an issue, so it makes me unemployable.”

If Ferguson offered him his old job back, would he take it?

“I would want to do it for a day,” Wilson said.

Related video: