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.
Another man and a woman were removed from the house without incident and Dotson revealed the house had been served with previous search warrants, including one about 18 months ago that yielded several illegal guns. Three additional weapons and crack cocaine were also recovered at or near the residence. One gun was found in the house itself and two others over the fence where they were tossed when the two suspects fled the house. Two of the three remaining guns were also stolen weapons. “Detectives were looking for guns, looking for violent felons, looking for people that have been committing crimes in the neighborhood,” Dotson added.
