There are no rallies or no news cameras there, no signs or ribbons to mark the spot where, the police say, Deandre Joshua, 20, was shot once in the head and then set on fire inside his car. He was the only person killed during the fires, looting and riots that shook the city after a grand jury declined to indict a white police officer in Mr. Brown’s killing. But in the days since, Mr. Joshua’s death has largely become a footnote to Ferguson’s story — an open homicide case and a bitter mystery for his family. “The unknown is what scares me,” his mother, Maria, 39, said in an interview at her home in nearby University City, where her son and his identical twin brother, Dont’A (Don-TAY), shared the basement. “I don’t know what happened to him.” The police have offered few details about the killing. Chief Jon Belmar of the St. Louis County Police suggested last week that there could be “a nexus” between the broader unrest and Mr. Joshua’s death, but a police spokesman said it remained unclear whether there was any direct link. The police have not named any suspects, and have said it was unclear precisely when Mr. Joshua was killed or why his body was burned. Last Tuesday, the morning after the riots, Ms. Joshua was watching the news, she said, when she saw reports of a body found inside a white Pontiac Grand Prix near the Canfield Green Apartments, in the neighborhood where Mr. Brown had been killed. The news cameras focused in to reveal a crack in the car’s bumper and a missing front license plate. And Ms. Joshua said: “I knew it was him. It was him.” She and Dont’A rushed to the scene. His mother and brother described Mr. Joshua as a young man who liked to joke, worked nights stocking shelves at Walmart and dreamed of becoming a rapper. He graduated from Jennings Senior High School in 2012, according to Tiffany Anderson, the district superintendent. He lived with his mother, brother and two younger sisters, and was still trying to figure out his way in the world, his family said. He considered joining the Army or applying to community college, but let both options slide. His family said Mr. Joshua had never joined the marches and protests over Mr. Brown’s shooting, even though, in a twist of fate, the twin brothers were childhood friends with a crucial figure in the case, the witness who was walking with Mr. Brown when he was killed. “It was just something that happened,” Dont’A Joshua said of the Brown shooting. The area where Mr. Joshua and Mr. Brown died is one of the more violent corners of Ferguson, accounting for 18 percent of all serious crimes reported from 2010 to August 2012, according to an analysis of crime statistics by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Mr. Joshua never told his family that he felt threatened there, and he did not seem to have any enemies, his mother and brother said. But as Ferguson grew tense as the grand jury prepared to decide the fate of Darren Wilson, the officer who shot Mr. Brown, Ms. Joshua worried about Deandre, she said. “I kept calling him that day, to tell him to be careful with this Ferguson riots,” she said. “And I never got an answer. I couldn’t get an answer.” That night, Ms. Joshua said, Deandre watched the grand jury announcement with his aunt and two cousins on Winkler Drive, about a mile east of where his body was found. He was happy because Walmart had canceled his shift in anticipation of unrest. Around 2 a.m., as a dozen buildings along West Florissant Avenue were burning and gunshots were crackling through the city, Ms. Joshua said, her son left his aunt’s home to make the short drive to the apartment of a girl he had been seeing for about a month. It is unclear how he ended up in the nearby parking lot of the Northwinds Apartments. His death became fodder for online speculation, caught in the fervor over the unrest in Ferguson. People sifting through thousands of pages of redacted grand jury testimony from the Brown case posited that Mr. Joshua was one of the unnamed witnesses. But Mr. Joshua’s family said he had known nothing about Mr. Brown’s death and never testified before the grand jury. A former girlfriend, Chasity Jones, a student at Southern Illinois University, said she and Mr. Joshua were at a St. Louis-area beauty salon in August when they heard news of Mr. Brown’s death. Missouri court records show that Deandre Joshua was arrested once, on a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest, in April 2013, and had completed his sentence of community service and a year’s probation. A full record of the incident was not immediately available from the St. Louis County Police. As it waits for answers, his family has started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to cover his funeral and burial. The family scans the online speculation about him, but tries to look beyond it. And Ms. Joshua said she found herself driving past that ordinary-looking parking lot. “I don’t know why I go there — I just ride by,” she said. “That was the last place he was at.”
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 18:03:25 +0000
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