It was kill or be killed.
The Ferguson cop who has been vilified for fatally shooting an unarmed teen said on Tuesday he only squeezed the trigger because he thought he was about to die.
“I have a clean conscience,” Darren Wilson said to ABC’s George Stephanopolous, who talked with him for an hour and a half at an undisclosed location in St. Louis. “I know I did my job right.”
Wilson, who was spared criminal charges by a grand jury Monday night, detailed the 90-second encounter that ended in him firing a series of shots that killed robbery suspect Michael Brown on Aug. 9.
The first thing he said to Brown was, “Hey, come here for a minute.”
Wilson said the young man refused, spitting back, “What the f–k are you going to do about it?” Brown, 18, then slammed his police car door shut and “threw the first punch” to Wilson’s left side.
The cop said he instantly feared for his life.
“I just felt the immense power that he had,” he said, admitting that he is also a big guy. “The way I’ve described it, is it was like a 5-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan. That’s just how big this man was.”
In survival mode, he wondered whether he was legally allowed to fire his weapon.
“Can I shoot this guy?” Wilson said he asked himself. He decided the answer quickly.
“If I don’t, he’ll kill me,” he thought. “He will kill me if he gets to me.”
He said he believed he couldn’t “withstand another hit like that,” referring to the blistering blows Brown had struck him with.
That’s when Wilson reached for his gun, yelling, “Get back or I’m going to shoot you.”
“And then his response was like immediately he grabbed the top of my gun and … he said, ‘You’re too much of a p–sy to shoot me.’ And while he’s doing that I can feel his hand trying to come over my hand and get inside the trigger guard and try and shoot me with my own gun.
“And that’s when I pulled the trigger for the first time. It didn’t go off. The gun was actually being jammed by his hand on top of the firearm. So I tried again and again, another click. ”
Wilson said his first shot didn’t go off because Brown’s fingers were blocking the trigger.
“This has to work or I’m going to be dead,” he thought as he pulled the trigger again. “He’s going to get this gun away from me. Something is going to happen and I’m going to be dead. So I pull a third time and it finally goes off.”
Wilson said the shot only further enraged Brown.
“He gets even angrier. The aggression in his face, the intensity, it just increases. And he comes back in at me again. I wasn’t looking at him, I was just . . . expecting another hit and I put my gun up and fired.
“Then I go to exit my car. And when I’m getting out I use my walkie and I say, ‘Shots fired! Send more cars!’ And I start chasing after Michael Brown.”
When asked why he gave chase, Wilson said, “My job isn’t just to sit and wait. I have to see where this guy goes. That’s what we were trained to do.”
At this point, Wilson said, Brown’s hands were near his waist, and Wilson was unsure whether Brown was armed.
“My initial thought was, ‘Is there a weapon in there?’ ” he said. “It was still just the unknown.”
Wilson denied that Brown put his hands up, a universal sign of surrender, telling Stephanopoulos there was “no way.”
The cop then fired another round of shots, acknowledging that “one of them hit [Brown]” after Brown’s body “flinched a little.”
When the interviewer asked Wilson if he could have done anything to prevent the shooting, the cop had one simple answer. “No,” he said confidently. “All I wanted to do was live.”
Wilson said the only thing he wants is for him and his new wife to get their lives back.
“We just want to have a normal life,” he said. “That’s it.”
Wilson’s comments came after a letter he sent to supporters surfaced in which he thanked them for their thoughts and prayers “during this stressful time.”
“Your support and dedication is amazing, and it is still hard to believe that all of these people that I have never met are doing so much for me,” Wilson wrote.
Additional reporting by Jamie Schram and Kate Sheehy
