Danny Wicentowski

Police responded to a protest last week following the death of Mansur Ball-Bey, who killed by a St. Louis metro officer under disputed circumstances.

Police sources tell the Post-Dispatch that investigators found fingerprints and DNA on the gun police say Ball-Bey pointed at them, but the results are not yet available. Sources also say a witness has come forward who heard the officers' shots, then saw Ball-Bey throw his weapon before running through a gangway and collapsing in the front yard.

Huh. Post-Dispatch remove a major (unverified?) detail from a Christine Byers' story, but then just pretend they didn't? #MansurBallBey — TC (@tchop_stl) August 25, 2015

I'm actually flabbergasted removal of the DNA/fingerprint on gun info wasn't at least acknowledged in an update/correction. #MansurBallBey — TC (@tchop_stl) August 25, 2015

This morning, eagle-eyed Twitter userpointed out a curious change in thecoverage of last week's police shooting of Mansur Ball-Bey . Police say the eighteen-year-old pointed a gun before two officers opened fire, killing the teen, and the initial report from theincluded this detail:But the paragraph, preserved in a cached version of the story , was deleted without explanation sometime after the article was published.@tchop_stl tweeted her confusion about the missing, anonymously sourced paragraph, rightly pointing out that the existence of DNA and fingerprints evidence is hardly a minor detail in this story. Lawyers for Ball-Bey's family insist the teen was not armed when an officer shot him in the back on August 19, following what police say was a raid on a known drug house in the Fountain Park neighborhood. The existence of such evidence could add clarity to a police shooting that's already the target of multiple investigations and intense public scrutiny.This wouldn't be the first the timeran into problems with relying on "police sources."When Dorian Johnson, a witness to Michael Brown's death last year, was arrested in May during a block party, theinitially cited unnamed police sources to report that Johnson was suspected of possessing a drink containing "cough medication mixed with what police believe to be an illegal narcotic."When the drink was tested in a lab, however, no drugs were found Another example can be found in the newspaper's coverage of the November arrests of two local members of the New Black Panther Party. When the broke the news , the article cited "sources close to the investigation" to describe how the two men used a girlfriend's Electronic Benefit Transfer card to buy pipe bombs.A followup story also mentioned the welfare-funded pipe bomb plot, but the item disappeared from the's later coverage. In June, we asked U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan about the matter, and he said the "sources close to the investigation" were not from his office and that the details about the EBT card and girlfriend were flat-out false As with the Ball-Bey article, no corrections were added to either story to acknowledge that the anonymously sourced police info wasn't true.We've reached out to the tworeporters bylined on the Ball-Bey story, Christine Byers and Jesse Bogan. We'll update the story if/when we hear back.@tchop_stl informs us that livestreamer Heather De Mian was actually the first to notice the's editing of the Ball-Bey story.Thehas issued a response to our story, defending its reporting. It's online here