Thanks to the media and other agitators/community activists, Officer Wilson will not have a normal life.
Via WAPO
Darren Wilson was mowing his lawn Aug. 19 — 10 days after he’d shot an
unarmedteenager — when he got a call telling him that his address was popping up in online reports. He quickly packed up his belongings and moved in with a relative, somebody who didn’t have the same last name. By nightfall, media members were outside the house.Wilson then spent about a week with one of his attorneys, Greg Kloeppel, until finally he moved into what his legal team now calls the “quote-unquote permanent location,” which they declined to disclose. Wilson hasn’t been back to his ranch-style home since he stopped cutting the grass midway through.
“You want to buy a house?” another Wilson attorney, James Towey, asked.
Wilson’s four-person legal team spoke with The Washington Post on Wednesday about their strategies during a 3 1/2- month period from which Wilson emerged facing no criminal charges but also contending with a lost career and reputation. They said that their client, who had become nationally a “poster child for bad race relations,” was the perfect legal weapon behind the scenes: He stayed silent publicly, and when he spoke to investigators and jurors, his version of events remained consistent.[…]
In the first weeks after the shooting, Wilson retained hope that he would be able to reclaim his job as an officer. Although the Ferguson department hasn’t yet officially determined Wilson’s future, the decision makes little difference, Wilson’s attorneys said. He won’t be returning to that police department or any other.
“At first [his thinking] was, ‘I want to go back, I’m a cop, I want to still be a cop,’ ” attorney Danielle Thompson said. “It took some time for him to realize that wasn’t exactly going to be what happened.”
Towey added: “I think I expressed to him, ‘Do you realize your first call [back on the job] will be to a blind alley where you’re executed?’ He took a pause for a minute, thought about it and said, ‘Oh.’ That is the reality.”
