ST. LOUIS _ It's been more than a week since a St. Louis police officer shot a 15-year-old boy they say was armed with a gun, leaving him critically wounded _ and beyond that, the department hasn't said much else.
What kind of gun was he carrying? Was it loaded? Did the officer yell commands at the teenager before firing? How many times did the officer fire? Is there video showing the shooting?
All remain unanswered.
The department did not make Chief John Hayden or other officials available for updates in the Sept. 26 shooting of Branden Leachman. In a statement in response to questions posed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Public Information Officer Michelle Woodling said the answers were part of an "ongoing investigation." She did say that the boy's condition had been upgraded to critical and stable condition. He had initially been listed as critical and unstable.
The lack of information from the Police Department has angered activists in a community that was promised _ and arguably initially given _ more transparency in cases of police shootings following the controversial police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson four years ago.
The 15-year-old's family says they're in the dark, too.
Jennifer Crawford, 26, said her nephew was shot four times. He has wounds to his thigh, back, right shoulder and back of the head, she said.
"He's doing better," Crawford said Wednesday. "He's awake and becoming a little alert. He's not talking yet."
Crawford said police have told the family only that they are still investigating.
"Nobody has said anything," she said.
Mayor Lyda Krewson said Wednesday that she was unfamiliar with the department's current protocol when it comes to how it releases information about police shootings, but said she "expects transparency from the Police Department."
She vowed to check into the matter to learn what information the department gave the public regarding the shooting and when it plans to release more.
Hayden spoke for several minutes at the scene about two hours after the teen was shot.
He gave this account: Police began to get calls about 11:45 a.m. about a disturbance involving a group of youths, and one was reportedly armed. A 40-year-old gang unit officer happened upon the disturbance, at Union Boulevard and Wabada Avenue. The officer, wearing street clothes, confronted the 15-year-old and fired several times after the teen turned toward him with a gun in his hand.
Police found a pistol at the scene, but did not believe the teen fired any shots, Hayden said.
The officer has been with the force for 10 years and was placed on leave, as is routine in officer-involved shooting investigations.
Hayden took questions from reporters, but said he couldn't answer many of them so soon after the shooting. He vowed at least twice to update the media with more details on the "developing situation."
"As soon as there is other information we can provide to the media, we will provide it," he said.
The department posted a six-minute video of Hayden's remarks at the scene to social media but has not provided any other information.
The department's handling of public information about the latest shooting stands in stark contrast with how it handled shootings following the controversial killing of Brown in Ferguson in August 2014.
Nine days after that shooting, two St. Louis officers shot and killed a man armed with a knife. Protesters and reporters in town from all over the world rushed from the site of Ferguson protests to the scene of the shooting. They surrounded then-Chief Sam Dotson as he gave an initial account of the shooting. The next day, the department released a bystander's cellphone video even though it differed in some ways from Dotson's initial summary of the shooting.
As recently as June 2017, the day after SWAT officers killed a man they said opened fire on them with an AK-47 during a raid on a house in St. Louis, the department hosted a news conference at headquarters to show the AK-47 and answer more questions about the shooting.
Hayden said at his news conference that police were speaking to witnesses of last week's shooting, but he didn't say what they'd seen or whether their accounts agreed with the police version of the shooting.
Crawford, the boy's aunt, said family members didn't believe Branden carried a gun, but conceded that he could have been armed with a friend's weapon. A witness told the Post-Dispatch she saw the boy who was shot, and said he had a gun. She was trying to break up a fight between two girls and had her back turned when police shot the teen, she said. She didn't hear any commands for the boy to drop the weapon.
One activist group called the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression criticized Hayden earlier this week for immediately laying out "a story with so few answers" and called it "an attempt to justify what happened."
The organization also called out the department's Force Investigation Unit, which was formed in August 2014 to investigate shootings that involve people who are wounded or killed by city officers' gunfire.
The unit has investigated more than three dozen shootings since its formation, but the department won't release FIU reports until prosecutors review them and either decline or issue charges against an officer.
Only a handful of FIU reports have been released. The last time that happened was in June 2016.
Prosecutors and police blame each other for delays in the release of reports, which hasn't gone unnoticed among activists.
"In light of that unit's pattern of delay, we want to know what oversight the chief is providing to guarantee that this investigation does not drag out over a year," the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression wrote in its statement about the shooting of the 15-year-old.
