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Police investigate drive-by shooting near Ferguson march

Several other unarmed black men have since died in cities including New York, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Arlington, Texas.

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Mr Brown Sr also led a parade of several hundred people on Saturday. Makeshift memorials featuring candles and teddy bears also reportedly were scattered throughout the area.

Some who marched on Sunday wore T-shirts with likenesses of Brown or messages such as “Please stop killing us” or “Hands up!” “I hurt every day”. Though some groups are pledging civil disobedience in the St. Louis region, Brown on Saturday urged everyone to mark his son’s death in peace.

The killing in Ferguson, Missouri – a suburb of St. Louis – set off a summer of protests and intense scrutiny of heavy-handed police tactics in a series of cases that ended in the deaths of unarmed young blacks.

Michael Brown Sr (centre) at the spot where his son was killed comforts his wife Cal Brown.

The crowds were mainly subdued during mid-day, but they eventually picked up when hundreds of people made their way to the Ferguson Police Department and mocked the officers who looked on.

Outrage over the deaths of Brown and a series of other black Americans at the hands of the police in the past year has been channelled into a sustained nation-wide movement with the social media hashtag #Blacklivesmat-ter becoming its rallying cry across the country.

Brown graduated from high school weeks before the shooting and planned to go to trade school to study to become a heating and air conditioning technician.

Relatives and friends described Brown as a quiet, gentle giant who stood around 6-foot-3 and weighed almost 300 pounds. However police stated Brown stole gadgets from a comfort retailer and shoved the proprietor who tried to cease him on the morning of August 9, 2014. “But you can’t disenfranchise an entire people, and then expect them not to react”. Commanders allowed protesters to gather in the road and remained largely out of sight, preventing the escalating confrontations that led to dozens of arrests at past demonstrations. It spilled outside, and Wilson claimed that Brown came at him, menacingly, leading to the fatal shooting. Some witnesses claimed Brown had his arms up in give up.

A federal review found that the officer, , broke no laws when he shot Brown. He resigned days later.

In a report on the death of Michael Brown released in March, the Justice Department demanded deep reforms in the police forces and local judicial systems, denounced for their systematic racial bias, which, according to the Attorney General Eric Holder, have created a “toxic environment”.

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The city’s police chief, city manager and municipal court judge all left their jobs following the report. All three have been white.

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