A disturbing yet familiar scenario is playing out once again in St. Louis, where police made nine arrests and dispersed demonstrators protesting the shooting of black American Mansur Ball-Bey, 18, on Wednesday. According to police, Bell-Bey aimed a weapon at two white officers who returned fire, killing him. Unsurprisingly, the protesters are disputing police accounts of the incident.
The Fountain Park neighborhood where the shooting occurred is an area of abandoned, boarded up houses “plagued by violence,” noted St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson. In recent days, a business near the shooting site was hit with gunfire, and a 93-year-old Tuskagee Airman was robbed and carjacked last Sunday when he got lost trying to find his daughter’s home and stopped to call her. A man got in the airman’s car robbing him and fleeing in another vehicle. The airman tried to track him, but pulled over once again to ask two men for help. The duo carjacked him.