THEO WELLING

Anthony Shahid​(in all black) ​and Phillip Duvall​ prodded the circuit attorney to give the Stockley case a fresh look in 2016.

The roots of the protests that continue to rock St. Louis reach deeper than former police officer Jason Stockley's acquittal for murder. To trace them, one must look back, beyond the mass arrests and clouds of pepper spray, past the judge's ruling on September 15 and even beyond the five-day trial in August that culminated with Stockley testifying that, yes, he had shot Anthony Lamar Smith dead in December 2011.

Trace those roots, perhaps, back to May 2016.

On May 16, U.S. Marshals arrested Stockley in his Texas home and shipped him to St. Louis to face first-degree murder charges and accusations that he'd killed the unarmed 24-year-old and planted a gun to justify the murder.

The news was explosive. It's not every day a cop is charged with murder over a matter that has already been passed over by local, state and federal investigators. And first-degree? No cop in St. Louis had ever been accused, let alone convicted, of committing a pre-mediated slaying in the line of duty.

The Reverend Philip Duvall wasn't surprised. For months, he had been working with other activists to reignite interest in the Stockley case, a campaign that included both press conferences and back-channel meetings with city officials. He knew that Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce had reopened the case and was pleased to see her take action.

He still wasn't prepared for what happened eight days later.

On the morning of May 25, Duvall's phone buzzed with an unfamiliar number. The caller had urgent instructions — Duvall, he said, needed to visit a public library in north city.

"There's a package there for you," the voice told Duvall. "We have information that will be most helpful in what you and Shahid are trying to uncover."

Duvall's partner in pushing for Stockley's prosecution was activist Anthony Shahid, a polarizing and often abrasive provocateur who has spent years accusing St. Louis' political and police establishments of racism and corruption.

Duvall and Shahid had known each other for decades. In January 2016, Duvall says, Shahid confided to him that sources within the police department were finally feeling pangs of conscience over a "coverup" in the four-year-old Stockley case.

Three years before, a wrongful death suit filed by Smith's family resulted in a $900,000 settlement — thought to be the largest such payout in the city's history — but the criminal case languished.

After the initial investigation, homicide detectives determined that no laws been broken. An Internal Affairs investigation went nowhere.

Since the St. Louis police department was then regulated by the state, the case fell to the U.S. Attorney's office. The FBI opened an investigation, followed by the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. In November 2012, then-U.S. Attorney Richard Callahan decided the evidence was lacking and declined to prosecute Stockley.

At the time, Callahan had informally invited prosecutors in the office of the circuit attorney to review the case. In the following year, the city took control of the police department, thus granting the office the responsibility to prosecute crimes committed by police officers. But again, there was silence.

Even as the activists staged press conferences with Smith's mother outside City Hall and demanded that Stockley face justice, they were mostly going on gut instinct. Aside from Shahid's insider sources, Duvall acknowledges, the activists still had no access to evidence they believed would prove that Stockley was a gun-planting killer cop. Even some material that might normally become public years after a shooting was still under a federal judge's protective order in the civil case.

Everything changed when Duvall picked up the phone that morning in May.

Following the instructions of the anonymous caller, Duvall and Shahid met at the Julia Davis branch of the St. Louis public library. The activists waited at the front desk while a librarian rummaged through a back office, returning a few minutes later with an envelope bearing Duvall's name.

Inside was a flash drive. The two men found a table in a quiet corner of the library and plugged the drive into Duvall's laptop. It held three video files. Duvall scrolled to the first one and hit play.

"I never asked who the leaker was," Duvall says in an interview. But whoever it was had given the two activists what seemed like the smoking gun: hard evidence that something was not right about Stockley's story about being "in fear for his safety" from an armed drug suspect.

The files contained around ten minutes of footage showing the immediate aftermath of Smith's death on December 20, 2011 — a critical discovery that, they would later learn, prosecutors had used to run with the case years after it had been abandoned by multiple agencies. The perspective suggested that the video had been shot from the second floor of a nearby building, an angle granting a bird's-eye view of the death scene. They could see Stockley walking around the totaled silver Buick where Smith's body still sat in the driver's seat, bleeding into the cushion.

The video shook both Duvall and Shahid.

"I was angry," the pastor recalls. After all, the video was more than four years old. "Why would it take so long for this leak out?"

click to enlarge SCREENSHOT FROM EVIDENCE VIDEO

Among the critical pieces of evidence: cellphone footage shot by a bystander and not recovered by prosecutors until 2016.

For all the controversy that continues to surround Jason Stockley's shooting of Anthony Lamar Smith, many things cannot be disputed about that day for one reason: Almost every part of their fatal interaction was captured, one way or another, on video.

Before the events shown in the videos anonymously deposited at the library, two previous videos had shaped the understanding of Smith's death. The first, captured by surveillance cameras at a north city Church's Chicken, shows the beginning of the incident that would lead to the fatal shooting. Then a dashcam video picks up from there.

At 12:38 p.m. on December 20, 2011, the Church's Chicken camera captured Smith parking a silver Buick. The sky was overcast, and water droplets speck the camera lens as Smith exits the sedan. Smith leaves the engine running, windshield wipers batting at the rain.

But as Smith returns to his still-running car, a police SUV whips around the corner and pulls behind him, attempting to block the Buick in place.

Behind the wheel was Brian Bianchi, an officer who had joined the force less than two years before, and who was about to demonstrate some spectacularly bad driving. Stockley, a West Point grad and Army veteran who became a St. Louis cop in 2007, was riding shotgun.

On the surveillance video, things happen rapidly. Smith's Buick lurches forward, then reverses. Stockley and Bianchi leap out of the SUV. Smith, still blocked in, backs up and collides with the SUV and then tries to pull the car rightward.

There isn't enough room for the turn, so Smith reverses yet again, and Bianchi pistol-smashes the Buick's driver-side window as Smith hurtles his car backwards. (Bianchi told investigators that at this point he spotted the suspect cradling a silver revolver. Stockley claimed Bianchi shouted "gun!")

As for Stockley, he runs to the Buick's passenger side carrying an AK-47, one he wasn't authorized to wield on duty. As Smith switches gears and accelerates away from Bianchi, the Buick clips Stockley's arm and roars out of the parking lot.

Stockley gives chase on foot, firing seven times at the fleeing suspect — using his standard-issue Beretta. (Stockley would later testify that he was afraid to fire the unauthorized AK-47, since its assault rifle rounds can penetrate multiple walls and could have struck bystanders.) Stockley's shots miss, and he clambers into the SUV. Bianchi is behind the wheel.

What followed was a chase through north city at speeds approaching 90 miles per hour. About a minute in, the dashcam records Bianchi driving into a stop sign, and shortly after that, he nearly loses Smith on a simple left turn. After that, in between bursts of radio static, the dashcam's audio picks up Stockley swearing, "Going to kill this motherfucker, don't you know."

Two minutes later, though, the dashcam records Smith's Buick lurching into oncoming traffic. At this point, the dashcam audio recorder picks up Stockley shouting at Bianchi, "Hit him! Hit him right now!"

Bianchi does so, slamming into the rear of the Buick. The force of the impact spins the sedan 90 degrees, disabling it near the intersection of West Florissant and Acme avenues.

In the last minutes of the grainy dashcam video, Bianchi and Stockley leap out of the SUV and together struggle to pull back the airbags covering the Buick's driver-side window. Seconds later, Stockley unloads five bullets into Smith.

The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department never released the Church's Chicken surveillance footage or the dashcam videos to the public, although in 2012 the department allowed a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter to view and describe what the dashcam captured. For years, those videos represented the only documentary evidence of the shooting that wasn't signed by Stockley or Bianchi on SLMPD letterhead.

But four years later, in a public library in north city, Duvalll and Shahid could only shake their heads at the new video they were watching. This was no dashcam or parking lot surveillance footage. This looked to be footage shot by a bystander on a smartphone. It showed the aftermath of the shooting — and, they believed, Stockley planting a gun on the dying suspect he'd just shot.

click to enlarge DARRYL GRAY

Before obtaining the cellphone video, Reverend Phillip Duvall says he and Shahid "had absolutely nothing but a hunch" to support their theory of a coverup.

The three clips on the flash drive are each between two and four minutes in length. From the vantage point of a second-story window, the video zooms and pans across the faces of Stockley, Bianchi and other police officers who arrived at the scene. At times, the footage is crystal clear.

In the first clip, you can see rain falling, the gray winter sky and the Buick's windshield wipers still flicking back and forth as Stockley calmly walks to his police SUV and stows his AK-47 in the back seat.

Over the next several minutes, blue police uniforms crowd around the Buick. Stockley walks back to the police SUV, takes off his gloves and rummages in the back seat, just beyond the camera frame. Then he and Bianchi talk with a supervisor. Stockley walks back to the Buick, and soon officers drag Smith, still breathing, from the driver seat. He would be pronounced dead at a hospital later that day.

Stockley then climbs in the driver seat and spends 30 seconds doing something the camera cannot see. Then Stockley gets out and rejoins Bianchi and a supervisor.

"As soon as I saw the aftermath tapes, I wanted to release them right way," says Duvall. He and Shahid handed over the clips to the Post-Dispatch's Christine Byers, who quoted Duvall in a bombshell story published June 3.

In the story, Duvall laid out virtually the same argument that prosecutors would eventually deploy at trial. The video, he said, contradicted Stockley's claims that he'd gone back to the SUV to obtain a "Quick Clot" pack to stanch Smith's bleeding — the video shows Stockley carrying nothing of the sort. Could the officer instead have gotten a gun from a bag in the back seat of the police SUV, a gun then planted in Smith's car to justify the shooting? Shahid and Duvall thought so.

But most damning, at least to Duvall's eye, was Stockley's demeanor. On tape, the officer seems calm and methodical even as Smith, a drug suspect purported to be armed, remains sitting in the Buick's driver seat. Stockley's behavior — as well as that of other officers on the scene — seems fundamentally inconsistent with someone who fears an armed suspect.

"There is no urgency in any of those officers," Duvall told Byers.

More than a year later, prosecutors argued at trial that the video evidence — starting in the Church's parking lot and through the fatal shooting — exposed too many inconsistencies: Stockley broke police policy by firing after a fleeing suspect, carried an unauthorized AK-47 and removed his gloves before searching Smith's car for the revolver. (Only without gloves, after all, could Stockley later explain why his DNA was on the gun he purported to find in Smith's car.)

In an internal memo Stockley filed hours after the shooting, the officer claimed that when he came to the driver side of the Buick, Smith had refused orders to show him his hands. Stockley wrote, "In fear for my safety and the safety of my partner, I discharged my department-issued firearm at the subject."

Whether that was true was a question the videos could not solve. Only Stockley, Bianchi and Smith were privy to that moment. Smith is dead. Bianchi was never charged and later refused to testify at trial after an immunity deal collapsed. But Duvall and Shahid thought the videos provided important context — enough to call into question everything Stockley did that day.

But the roots of the case, again, go even deeper. What motivated investigators to reopen the case after state and federal agencies passed it by? Had anything really changed since 2011 other than the political pressure applied by activists? Was this a matter of coverup, incompetence, or something in between?

Talk to Shahid, and the matter becomes simple, even elegant. In his telling, the only questions that matter are the ones triggered by a Sunshine Request to the city in January 2016, months before Circuit Attorney Joyce decided to take another swing at charging Stockley.

It was the demands in that letter, Shahid claims, that "rattled the whole case."

click to enlarge DANNY WICENTOWSKI

Activists spent months locating Smith's mother, Annie. Now she's a frequent presence at protests.

To say that activist Anthony Shahid has a complicated reputation is like saying the Pacific Ocean is deep or that the Mississippi River is long. He cultivates both an air of elusiveness and theatricality. He's been known to use props such as nooses and KKK robes. He is revered in some circles and highly suspect in others.

Shahid has spent decades working in and out of the limelight. In the summer of 2014, he showed up to protests in Ferguson wearing chains around his neck and carrying stuffed toy dogs, items that he said represented the chains of slavery. The dogs were stand-ins for the police dogs deployed against protesters demanding justice for Michael Brown, who was gunned down in a fatal confrontation with a Ferguson police officer.

To Shahid, Anthony Lamar Smith was actually "the Mike Brown before Mike Brown."

While the Ferguson teenager's death led to heated protests that took the region — and country — by storm, Smith's death in 2011 was marked by only a handful of mourners and a vigil. His name was not chanted through the streets or held aloft on signs.

"Nobody was making a big issue about black people getting killed," Shahid says. "It wasn't hot then."

All that changed with Ferguson, and in late 2015, Shahid claims he was contacted by a group of police officers.

"They asked me to pray with them," he says. "And they tell me, 'Brother Shahid, there's been a murder.' They start to tell me about December 20, 2011."

According to Shahid, the officers felt tortured by the long silence on Smith's case. They accused St. Louis' top police and elected officials of covering up murder. According to Shahid, the officers named names, including then-St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and a police major named Lawrence O'Toole.

"These policemen and policewomen came to me, they were concerned about the police department," says the activist. "They said, 'This is not what police do.' Now, these officers should have never had to come tell me this shit. I'm no damn police officer. But if they had reported this, most of them would probably wind up dead or ostracized."

And so Shahid did what he's done for decades: He made plans to give justice, so long deferred, a good hard shove. But before he could do that, he had to find Smith's mother, Annie. That alone took months of sleuthing. He also needed help to pressure to city officials to do something about the case.

In January 2016, Shahid reached out to Duvall. He told the pastor about Stockley, the police officers and the coverup. Duvall was in.

On January 14, Shahid submitted an open records request through the state's Sunshine law to the St. Louis police department. The request was divided into four demands.

One: He wanted the department to open the investigatory files on Smith's death. Two: He sought all correspondence between the department and City Hall relating to the "discipline, termination/separation" of Stockley. Three: He requested Stockley's disciplinary records. Four: Shahid asked for records of Stockley's psychological examinations.

The items were carefully chosen, based on what Shahid had been told by his police sources. And he believes it was this Sunshine request that spurred city officials to do what they should have done years ago: charge Stockley with murder.

"I was on to something," says Shahid. "They were hoping this day would never come."

Shahid, Duvall and others began applying pressure, writing letters and calling city officials to inquire about the status of the case. But aside from a six-page incident report, Shahid never got the information he requested. Much of the material was (and remains) locked behind a judge's protective order. The psychological exam is covered by a federal law protecting doctor-patient confidentiality.

Still, even if their press conferences attracted a mere handful of people and maybe a few reporters, he and Duvall believed they were barking up the right tree. By early May, the two activists had finally landed the meeting they had been chasing for months — a sit-down with Circuit Attorney Joyce.

click to enlarge COURTESY OF THE HARRIS COUNTY SHERIFF

Former police officer Jason Stockley's mugshot is now a familiar site.

According to Duvall and Shahid, Joyce claimed that her office had developed new leads, and that her investigators had been working with the police department's Internal Affairs division since March to put a case together that would stick. She made no promises, but, according to a third party familiar with the meeting, she assured the activists that her office was taking the matter "seriously."

To Shahid, any claim of "new evidence" was "a damn lie." But, he adds, "I was OK as long as she said she was going to lock him up."

Shahid notes that Joyce had her own request for the activists: Tone things down for a couple weeks while her office prepared to file charges. According to Duvall, Joyce explained that she didn't want to give Stockley's defense attorneys any justification for moving the venue. Shahid also claims Joyce was worried that Stockley was a flight risk.

Stockley had left St. Louis in 2013 following a suspension from the force. He'd been allowed to resign and moved to Houston, Texas.

On May 16, a Monday, Stockley was standing on the corner outside his condo when a small army of U.S. Marshals descended. According to a neighbor, the Marshals had "swarmed" around the corner in multiple vehicles.

"Certainly shocked," the neighbor told a Houston TV station. "He's a really nice guy."

In St. Louis, Shahid watched the news of Stockley's arrest with a feeling of rare vindication. There was the killer cop he'd been chasing, facing a judge at a bond hearing in an orange jumpsuit, facing a first-degree charge for murder.

After his transfer to St. Louis, however, Stockley spent less than two weeks in jail. On May 31, the St. Louis Police Officers' Association posted his $100,000 cash bond. The next time Shahid would see Stockley's face, it would be at trial.

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

Prosecutor Robert Steele, a former defense attorney, took the lead in Stockley's murder trial.

Fourteen months later, on August 1, 2017, Shahid, Duvall and other activists sat in the front row in the fifth-floor courtroom in downtown St. Louis. Much had changed in the city since Stockley was charged with murder. Joyce had declined to run for a fifth term, and the city's top prosecutor was now, for the first time, a black woman: Kim Gardner. Mayor Francis Slay had retired from political life. Police Chief Sam Dotson had resigned — or more accurately, was asked to resign — under the new administration of Mayor Lyda Krewson.

To the activists like Shahid, all the high-level movement looked like rats trying to escape a sinking ship. It appeared to confirm what he'd long suspected — a five-year coverup was about to be blown wide open.

The court rose as Judge Timothy Wilson entered the room. Months prior, Stockley had waived his right to a jury trial. Over the next five days of trial, Judge Wilson would serve as the sole arbiter of guilt and innocence.

Circuit Attorney Gardner sat to the side of the courtroom, listening to the proceedings and whispering in the ear of an assistant. She had swept into office on promises to reform the city's criminal justice system. While she didn't initiate the murder charges against Stockley, she was eager to fight for conviction.

The prosecution's opening statement was delivered by Assistant Circuit Attorney Aaron Levinson, and from the outset it was clear that the office would pull no punches. Levinson presented Stockley as nothing short of a cold-blooded murderer. He called Smith's death an "execution."

"Anthony Lamar Smith did not deserve to die," said Levinson. "Jason Stockley took his life away and tried to cover up his crime."

Stockley's defense attorney, Neil Bruntrager, was no less dramatic. In a moment of irony, he invoked the same accusations of a coverup as Shahid — only in his case, to suggest how implausible the idea was.

"Six other police officers were around the Buick as Jason Stockley got into the car," Bruntrager pointed out. "If Jason Stockley planted that gun, then all of them — every one of those police officers — are complicit in this crime. And there is no evidence as such."

Watching the trial, Duvall felt conflicted.

"There are certain things I just want to believe about this country," he said in an interview in late August, shortly after the trial's conclusion. "We can have evidence, we can have a tape, we can have signed statements, we can have all of that on the scales of justice. And it took us how many years to get here? Five years and eight months. I'm saying, structurally, the system is broken."

In the end, none of the evidence was sufficient. The cellphone video, jarring as it was, didn't actually show Stockley planting the revolver. A DNA analysis couldn't prove Stockley's blood was on the grip, and while Smith's DNA wasn't present at all on the gun, forensic experts testified that the absence of DNA can't be used to prove someone never touched an object. (And anyway, as Judge Wilson would later conclude in a sentence that set off a firestorm, "an urban heroin dealer not in possession of a firearm would be an anomaly.")

Even Stockley's recorded outburst — "going to kill this motherfucker" — wasn't enough. Judge Wilson agreed with Stockley's defense that the words were uttered in the middle of a high-speed chase. The utterance could be chalked up to a stressful situation, not an intent to kill.

"No one promised a rose garden," Wilson wrote in his September 15 ruling. He had spent the previous 28 pages deconstructing and dismissing the state's evidence. "This surely is not one."

Stockley, the judge wrote, could not be found guilty of first-degree murder with the evidence proffered by the state. In fact, he wrote, the evidence was so weak — and Stockley's claim of self-defense so strong — that the former-officer could not even be found guilty of a lesser charge like manslaughter.

"The state has failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant's use of deadly force was not justified in self-defense," Judge Wilson wrote. "The state has failed in its burden of proof."

Within the hour of the ruling, Shahid was leading the first group of protesters into the street outside City Hall.

DANNY WICENTOWSKI

Former Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce says she personally did not see key evidence in the case against Stockley until 2016.

Even as thousands of demonstrators took to the streets — organized not by Shahid or Duvall, but by a youthful cadre of protesters, faith leaders and city officials — the question remains. Why did it take so very long to charge Stockley?

When questioned about the delay in 2016, Joyce claimed that her office had only recently received new evidence on the case, including the DNA tests and cellphone video.

Dan Isom, who served as police chief in 2011, countered that his police investigators had promptly uncovered the key evidence in 2012. (Internal affairs investigator Kirk Deeken apparently testified as much under oath, as the Post-Dispatch reported recently.) Isom told the Post-Dispatch that the only thing that changed in the intervening years was Joyce's "political will." And indeed, Richard Callahan, then the U.S. Attorney for Missouri's Eastern District, told reporters in 2016 that his office had evaluated all the available evidence, including the DNA swabs, back in 2012.

But Joyce, in her first public comments about the case since leaving office, contends that politics had nothing to do with it.

"The initial investigation in this case was, from my perspective, very disjointed." Joyce writes in an email. While federal agencies and city cops investigated the case, she note that her office was only consulted "from time to time."

"We did not receive a formal, organized and comprehensive warrant application until six weeks before the case was charged [in 2016]," she writes. "It was very frustrating that so much time passed between the incident and the application of charges by police."

Even as Shahid and Duvall were trying to drum up interest in the case, on March 22, two of Joyce's prosecutors met with investigators from the St. Louis police department's Internal Affairs division. That was the first time Joyce saw the daschcam and surveillance footage.

Over the next six weeks, her office sorted through evidence that she says it had never been presented with during those informal meetings with the U.S. Attorney's Office in 2012. For the first time, she claims, city prosecutors got a look at the forensic evidence, including the .38 revolver bearing Stockley's DNA.

What she still didn't have, though, was the cellphone video of the shooting's aftermath. It wasn't until Joyce's office began to take a hard look at the case in 2016 that prosecutors realized the key evidence had been hiding in plain sight.

Among the witnesses who would ultimately testify at Stockley's trial was Antonio French, a man who shares a name with a former St. Louis alderman but bears no relation. On December 20, 2011, French had been cleaning the second floor of a club near the corner West Florissant and Acme avenues when he heard the crash of Smith's Buick being rammed to the side of the road. After watching Stockley shoot into the car, French pulled out his phone and started recording.

According to sources familiar with the FBI's reports on the investigation, the existence of French's cellphone video was noted by federal agents but never pursued to completion. On the witness stand in 2017, French testified that he had been interviewed by city detectives years before, but that at the time he was worried about involving himself in a police investigation. French testified that he'd told the police that his phone had been stolen and that he'd failed to make any copies of the video clips.

As he acknowledged on the stand, that had not been true.

Years later, Joyce simply reached out to French after she reopened the case. This time, he made a different choice. French sent her a copy of the three video clips and agreed to testify to a grand jury, which ultimately helped Joyce indict Stockley in August 2016.

Was the department only too willing initially to let French's evidence go untapped? Shahid and Duvall still believe that the St. Louis police department and other agencies covered up evidence and protected Stockley from the outset.

Joyce suggests that, in a way, she grew to share those concerns. While her emailed statement to the RFT does not directly address the agency's initial failure to get the video from French, she writes, "I've become convinced, due to the Stockley case and others, that the SLMPD cannot investigate itself effectively."

She credits former chief Sam Dotson for "somewhat" improving the department's investigation of officer-involved shootings. But what hasn't changed, she says, is the relationship between the department's internal investigators and the St. Louis police union.

"It is critical that truly independent investigators handle these important cases," she writes. "The current SLMPD investigators appear to have a very close relationship with the SLPOA [St. Louis Police Officers Association] and SLPOA lawyers. I believe this is a clear conflict of interest that effects the quality of their work in an unacceptable fashion.

Joyce and the activists aren't the only ones frustrated — and suspicious — of the initial investigation.

Shortly after Stockley was charged in May 2016, Albert Watkins, the defense attorney representing Smith's fiancee and daughter, added a stunning allegation of his own: Watkins claims that the Missouri Attorney General's Office — which represented the city in the 2012 civil case — never provided him with the forensic evidence that showed Stockley's DNA on the grip of the revolver allegedly belonging to Smith.

Watkins, of course, had already won his clients a massive settlement. But in a June 2016 letter, he blasted the attorney general's "misrepresentations" in the case. Smith's family was willing to set aside the settlement, Watkins wrote, and go back to court with the evidence they should have been given more than four years ago.

"The question is going to be whether there was collusion between the state and the city, or whether the city on its own decided they would not provide it to their counsel and keep it secret," Watkins says. "I find it very hard to believe that there would be collusion, but that's one possibility. I also find it very hard to believe that the Attorney General's Office would receive it from the city and not give it to us. I find it very plausible that the city had it and did not give it to the Attorney General's Office. But that's not for me to determine."

Ten days after the verdict, Missouri's new attorney general, Republican Josh Hawley, jumped into the fray — eagerly publicizing his willingness to cast blame on his Democratic predecessor, Chris Koster.

"The attorney for the family of Anthony Lamar Smith has raised serious allegations of wrongdoing by the Koster administration," Hawley said in a statement. "As Mr. Smith's family states, these allegations deserve 'a full, accurate and transparent' accounting."

The Attorney General's Office has since hired Hal Goldsmith, a partner at Bryan Cave and a veteran white-collar prosecutor, to probe whether its attorneys failed to turn over all the evidence to Watkins.

click to enlarge DANNY WICENTOWSKI

Protests around St. Louis are continuing three weeks after Stockley's acquittal.

More than two weeks after Judge Wilson issued his decision finding Stockley not guilty, protests have taken place almost every single day in St. Louis and its suburbs. Protesters have marched through shopping malls and city streets, through the parking lot of a suburban Target and in front of police headquarters. They've chanted "Anthony Lamar Smith," "no justice, no profits" and "the whole damn system is guilty as hell."

In a town hall meeting held in downtown St. Louis on September 28, protesters unveiled a list of demands, including the resignation of Mayor Krewson, the closure of the city's workhouse and an audit of the police department.

They've also called for the termination of acting police chief Lt. Colonel Lawrence O'Toole. O'Toole became a polarizing figure by boasting that the police "owned the night" after arresting 123 protesters, observers and even a Post-Dispatch reporter on September 17. Of that total, 120 were charged solely with "failure to disperse," and lawsuits are already being filed by people claiming they weren't given a chance to leave before being pepper-sprayed and even beaten by city cops.

But O'Toole's history with the Stockley case, too, has roots much deeper than his role in managing the department's response to the protests. Shahid has pointed to a photo that shows O'Toole, then a major, on the scene in the aftermath of Smith's killing — an unmistakable figure in a coat and tie standing just behind police tape as a crime lab staffer collects evidence in Smith's car.

The photo was published as part of a Post-Dispatch slideshow focused on the case, though O'Toole's presence in the image was not noted by the paper. O'Toole also never mentioned his presence in any of the numerous press conferences or interviews he conducted before or after the Stockley verdict.

The closest O'Toole ever got to a candid remark about Stockley came on August 31, while the city was still paralyzed in anticipation for the verdict. That afternoon, detectives had opened fire on a suspected car thief, striking him in the torso. As O'Toole wrapped up a press conference — the detective, the chief said, had acted in self-defense — a reporter asked O'Toole to comment on the impending verdict.

"In regards to the Stockley case, I will only say that the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department held Stockley accountable for his actions, and he is no longer employed by the St. Louis police department," O'Toole said. He pointed out that Stockley had been charged and afforded "the full transparency of the investigation that the police department conducted."

"Like it or not," O'Toole said, "the system is working."

Asked about the press conference now, Shahid calls O'Toole "a sneaky motherfucker."

"When he made that statement, that he's being 'transparent'? He's a motherfucking liar," Shahid says. "They're not being transparent on shit."

On September 25, Shahid marched with hundreds to the headquarters of the St. Louis police department to demand O'Toole's resignation. Bullhorn in hand, Shahid looked across the crowd of diverse, mostly young faces, and he roared invective at the glass façade rising above them.

Shahid passed the bullhorn to another activist, and he joined his booming voice to the swell of outrage echoing through the downtown street. A few feet away, a protester pointed to the silhouettes moving behind the windows above them. The police were watching.

Fists in the air, the crowd chanted back, "Blue silence! Is Violence!"