Michael Brown's parents say they don't believe much of what police officer Darren Wilson said in an interview Tuesday night, insisting the officer murdered their son.
Michael Brown Sr. and Lesley McSpadden talked to CNN on Wednesday, and responded to
comments made by Wilson in an interview with ABC News on Tuesday.
Wilson, who is white, told ABC he had a clear conscience about shooting Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old after a confrontation on Aug. 9.
"He's a murderer. That's what that tells me,"
Brown's father told CNN. "If he was conscious of what he was doing, that means he understood his actions. He didn't have a second thought, a pushback thought or nothing."
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Brown and McSpadden told the media that Wilson was intent on killing a black person, and their son had the misfortune of encountering him on that day.
Brown said that if he could say anything to Wilson, it would be to simply ask why he did it.
"Why did you wake up with an edge on your shoulder like that and have to interact with our son? And doing it like that. That was overkill," Brown said.
Wilson also told ABC News that he would have acted the same way if Brown had been white.
"Not true. I don't believe it," Brown's father told CNN. "I think the interaction would have been a whole lot different."
Wilson said he had initially encountered Brown and a friend walking in the street and told them to move to the sidewalk. Brown's father said that if Wilson had encountered a white person he probably would have driven past and waved or blown his horn.
Wilson said that Brown immediately became confrontational and attacked him. His parents said that was not his true demeanor and that "Mike-Mike," as his mother called him, was soft-spoken and "sweet."
CNN's Sunny Hostin asked Brown's parents about a store surveillance video shot moments before the fatal confrontation that shows Brown stealing cigarillos and violently shoving the store owner when he confronts him.
"You cannot judge him off an 18-second video. We've known him for 17 years. We know better . . . You cannot look at one image of a person and believe who they are in the whole," McSpadden said.
Brown's mother said that when she first heard on Monday that there was no indictment against Wilson, "it was like I got a phone call all over again about what had happened to my son . . . I felt just as helpless as I felt at the beginning."
She and her current husband, Louis Head, went to the protest site outside Ferguson police headquarters, and she addressed the crowd because she felt officials had never addressed her family.
"We heard this and it was just like, like I had been shot. Like you shooting me now – just no respect, no sympathy, nothing," Lesley McSpadden said of prosecutor Bob McColloch's announcement.
She defended Head, who was recorded on video yelling for people to "urn the [expeltive] down," repeatedly after the announcement was made.
"He just spoke out of anger. It's one thing to speak and it's a different thing to act. He did not act. He just spoke out of anger," McSpadden said. "When you're that hurt and the system has did you this wrong, you may say some things as well. We've all spoke out of anger before.
They said the looting and rioting that have taken place were not done in their son's name.
"They're doing it on their own agenda," Brown said. "I'm not angry at them, but they're not showing no respect for my son by doing it that way."
He said he now wants a federal trial and has faith there will be a different outcome. The Justice Department is carrying out two civil-rights investigations, one on the shooting and one on the Ferguson Police Department, Attorney General Eric Holder said this week.
Brown acknowledged that Thanksgiving and other coming holidays will be tough, as McSpadden wiped tears from her eyes.
Asked what she would say to Wilson, McSpadden said, "I hope the Lord has mercy on his soul."
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