Video Shows Michael Brown Beating Old Man – Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
A video posted on social media sites allegedly shows Michael Brown, the teenager who was killed by former police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, beating an elderly man who stole a backpack from him.
The Truth:
This eRumor is false.
A two-minute video of a young man attacking an older man accused of stealing a backpack from an apartment stoop appears on Facebook with the following caption:
The gentle GIANT Yea?
A MUST VIEW
Attached is a video taken from a cell phone, showing how Michael Brown…..(yes, the one and the same)….treats a senior black male. This 300 lb. young boy (that’s what media calls him) is the same Michael Brown that attempted to take a gun away from a police officer and paid with his life. Here is the fellow that all of the riots are about. Videos don’t lie. You will not see this in the media. Pass this around so the truth can be known. It needs to be seen!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, the Grand Jury got it
ALL WRONG.
The video was originally posted at YouTube in September of 2012 under the headline “Only n Woodland City.” The apartment complex shown in the video appears to be a large housing development in Dallas, Texas, called Woodland City Apartments, a place that Michael Brown never lived.
The poor quality of the video makes it difficult to determine whether the man shown attacking the elderly man has the same facial features as Michael Brown. But the man in the video appears to be much shorter than Michael Brown was. Standing somewhere between 6’4” and 6’5” tall, Michael Brown would have towered over the men he stood beside on the apartment stoop. Instead, they were all of equal height. The man in the video also doesn’t weigh more than 300 pounds, so he’s much smaller than Michael Brown was.
The user who first posted the video on Facebook in December of 2014 quickly removed the link, which led many people to speculate that Facebook administrators had censored the link:
WOW FACEBOOK TOOK DOWN THE PRIVATE HOME VIDEO I HAD ON MY PAGE OF MIKE BROWN BEATING AN OLD MAN AND ROBBING HIM OF HIS BACKPACK! IT’S HAS MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARED OFF EVERYONE’S PAGE THAT SHARED IT. I REMEMBER OVER 30,000 SHARES AS OF YESTERDAY AROUND 5PM CST WHEN i FIRST SHARED IT.
WE NEED TO ASK OURSELVES, WHY WOULD FACEBOOK WANT THIS KID TO BE SEEN AS A MARTYR? WHY WOULD THEY SENSOR THIS INFORMATION? WE ARE BOMBARDED EVERYDAY BY JIHAD VIDEOS AND STUPID PET TRICKS BUT WE CAN’T SHOW THE TRUTH ABOUT A PUNK THAT IS BEING HELD AS A CIVIL RIGHTS HERO? YOU SUCK FACEBOOK!!!!
But it appears that the original post was removed or made private by the user — not Facebook — after it went viral. The user then made the video public again, and it has since received more than 20 million views.