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Protest leader
Darren Seals, 29, was found shot inside a burning car in the
village of Riverview, about five miles east of Ferguson, early
on Tuesday, St. Louis County Police said in a statement.
Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, gained national attention because
of rioting after the August 2014 shooting of Brown, an unarmed
black 18-year-old, by white police officer Darren Wilson. Most
protests were peaceful, but violence erupted again when a grand
jury decided not to bring charges against Wilson.
A federal investigation later found patterns of racial
discrimination by Ferguson police.
The demonstrations helped to coalesce the civil rights movement
Black Lives Matter.
"I don’t recall anyone having a longer protest, a more
productive protest, a more creative protest than what we did,"
Seals said in an interview with MTV released in November 2014.
"I don’t think people will ever really appreciate what we did
until years from now."
Hours before Seals' death, he posted on Twitter about Colin
Kaepernick, a San Francisco 49ers National Football League
quarterback who protested racial injustice and police brutality
by declining to stand for the national anthem, and the U.S.
presidential election. In his Twitter profile, Seals described
himself as a "businessman, revolutionary, activist,
unapologetically BLACK, Afrikan in AmeriKKKa, fighter, leader."
Police have not determined a motive for the crime or identified
any witnesses, Sergeant Shawn McGuire said. McGuire declined to
say in which part of Seals' body he was shot.
County police said officers were first called to investigate a
burning vehicle in Riverview. "When the fire was extinguished, a
deceased male subject was located inside of the vehicle," the
department said in a statement.
Seals, whose last-known address was in St. Louis, was identified
as the victim.
(Reporting by Laila Kearney in New York; editing by Grant
McCool)
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