The cops belonged to a special "drug task force" drawn from various police departments and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. They allege that Murray was a drug dealer and that they had twice bought drugs from him.

Greg Freeman, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, wrote in a June 18 article that a "witness saw Murray get into his car when the police vehicle rammed the back of the car. Police then started shooting into his car, the witness said. One of the officers then ran up to the car and started firing more shots at the men inside the vehicle, according to the witness." The men were unarmed.

The cops claim Murray backed his car into an undercover police vehicle, got wedged under the bumper, revved his engine, and spun his tires. The cops fired out of fear for their lives because they were caught between the spinning tires and the curb, police officials claim.

In response, a series of protest meetings and marches have been called. The first meeting was held two days after the killings, at the All Saints Episcopal Church in North St. Louis. On June 19, more than 100 people gathered at the community center in Kinloch, a Black community in North St. Louis County.

Carol Wilkerson, one of the protesters and a state worker who lives in University City in St. Louis County, said, "Something needs to be done; this has got to be stopped. They assumed he had drugs. I knew Murray personally. He was slaughtered. He was shot four times in the face--once in the temple, once in the lip, and the other two times in the ear. Two lives were taken brutally. We demand to see the videotape, and we demand justice for the family and community."

"We are tired of this. It could have been any one of us," stated Clarnesia Collier, a bus driver for the Laidlaw Bus Company.

Protesters packed into the community center and heard talks by representatives of the National Action Network and the Urban League. The crowd spilled outside into the street. Following the talks, everyone went outside and lined up in rows of five. Wearing white ribbons with the names of Beasley and Murray on them, carrying candles, and waving white cloths, the 100 or more marchers were followed by a procession of 50 cars with their lights on.

Continuous chants of "No justice, no peace" and "We're fired up, can't take it no more" rang out as the crowd marched down North Hanley Road.  
 
Memorial at the killing scene
The marchers gathered around a memorial for Murray and Beasley, decorated with flowers, cards, and a silhouette target with a man with 19 red dots, in the parking lot of the Jack-in-the-Box.

"Today we have brothers and sisters here who are not going to stop until we get justice," Tiahmo Rauf, a spokesperson for the National Action Network, told the crowd. He invited everyone to attend a June 22 community meeting at the All Saints Church in St. Louis.

About 100 people turned out for this third meeting, which was chaired by Eric Vickers, a Democratic candidate for Congress. He said that those present at the emergency community meeting the previous week had decided to write the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, demanding the restaurant's surveillance videotapes of the incident and a special prosecutor to investigate the killings. The demands have not been met, he said, and proposed a June 28 march on the county prosecutor's office.

Representatives from Operation PUSH and other Democratic politicians also addressed the crowd. James Bardol of the NAACP said action was needed because "we want to bring credibility to the police."

Then many people from the crowd lined up at a microphone to speak. One woman told the audience, "Every Black person in the city of St. Louis should be here tonight. You can do something about this. We need thousands of people. We are tired of this and we are not going to tolerate it any more."

Many others spoke, blasting the rampant police violence targeted against Blacks in the city. Some talked about the need to get broad numbers of people to turn out for the protests, including immigrants, Blacks, and whites.

Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri, called for prosecuting and jailing the cops who killed the two men. She also pointed to the Kinloch march as an example in building a broad action.

In a statement released by her campaign, Kennedy stated, "The cops' job is to mete out punishment to working people.... It's not a question of rooting out the bad apples." The cops are an integral part of the capitalist state, which needs to be replaced by a government run by working people, she argued. As the way forward, Kennedy pointed to the course of working people relying on our own strength and seeking allies among others fighting exploitation and oppression exemplified in recent strikes and other struggles by workers and farmers.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home