Darren Wilson's Shocking TV Interview After Decision: I Wouldn't Have Done Anything Differently

Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who escaped prosecution for killing an unarmed black teenager, has insisted in a televised primetime interview that his actions were not motivated by race and that there was nothing he could have done to avoid the tragedy.

As protesters began to gather on the streets of Ferguson for a second night after the announcement that Wilson had been spared a grand jury indictment for killing Michael Brown, the police officer spoke bluntly about his conviction that he had acted correctly according to his training. Asked by George Stephanopoulos of ABC News whether there was anything he could have done differently to prevent the killing from taking place, he replied with a one-word answer: “No.”

“Nothing?” Stephanopoulos repeated.

“No,” he replied.

Despite Wilson’s protestation that he would have acted entirely the same way had the teenager been white and not black, the officer repeated the racially-charged description of Brown that he had given to the grand jury. He said that when they first had a contretemps while Wilson was sitting in his police car and Brown was standing beside it in the street, “I reached out of the window, and I felt the immense power that he had. It was like a five-year-old trying to hold onto Hulk Hogan. He was a very large, a very powerful man.”

“You’re a pretty big guy,” Stephanopoulos observed.

“Yeah, I’m above average,” he said.

In fact, Wilson is 6ft 4ins tall, about an inch taller than Brown.

The ABC interview appears to be the only media interaction to which Wilson has agreed at this stage. It was conducted over an hour in Ferguson on Tuesday, just hours after the grand jury verdict had been announced and the city had erupted in flames as protesters vented their fury.

As he moved to get out of the car, he said Brown had turned and said “What the fuck are you going to do about it?” and slammed the door shut on him.Wilson, answering questions in a forensic and slightly antiseptic way, repeated the narrative that he had given to the grand jury about what had happened on 9 August: that he had seen Brown and a friend walking down the middle of the road, and had pulled his patrol car alongside him.

“Then punches started flying. He threw the first one, that hit me on the left side of my face.” About 10 seconds of what Wilson described as “swinging and grabbing and pulling” ensued.

Wilson claimed that on several occasions, he had feared for his life. He wondered whether he could have survived another punch, then he said he felt Brown’s hand reaching for the trigger of his gun that he pulled from his right side.

He tried to shoot the gun but it just clicked twice. Again, Wilson stressed that he feared he was going to die. “I thought this has to work otherwise I’m going to be dead.”

The gun detonated on the third attempt, he claimed, telling ABC News that it was the first occasion in which he had ever fired his weapon on the job.

At that point, Brown started to run away and Wilson got out of the car and gave chase. Why didn’t he stay in the car, the interviewer asked.

“My job is not just to sit and wait. I have to see where this guy goes.”

“So you thought it was your duty to give chase?”

“Yes it was. That’s what we were trained to do,” he said.

When Brown was about 30 or 40 feet away down the road, he turned to face Wilson, the officer said. He put his right hand into his waistband and his left hand into a fist, “and he starts charging at me,” Wilson.

Asked to respond to the testimony of some witnesses that Brown had turned and put his hands in the air in a gesture of surrender or supplication, Wilson replied: “That would be incorrect. No way.”

The police officer said he gave himself a “mental check – can I legally shoot this guy?” The answer he came up with, according to his own account, was: “I have to, if I don’t he will kill me.”

Stephanopoulos did not press Wilson on this point in the 10-minute clip aired on ABC News. The officer was not asked why it was that he should have feared for his own life when he was standing pointing a gun at an unarmed teenager 30 feet away.

“I fired a series of shots and paused. I noticed one of them hit him I don’t know where, but I saw him flinch,” Wilson said.

He yelled to Brown to get on the ground but he wouldn’t and instead kept running at him, Wilson said. So he shot another round “and at least one of those hit him because I saw the flinch.”

When Brown was about eight feet away and appeared about to tackle him “I barrelled the gun and I fired at what I thought was his head, and that’s where it went.”

At the end of the clip, Stephanopoulos asked him what dreams he had for the future. “I just want to have a normal life.”

The TV presenter remarked that Wilson gave the impression of someone convinced by his own “very clean conscience”. The police officer who killed Michael Brown replied: “The reason I have a clean conscience is that I know that I did my job right.”

Further excerpts of the interview are expected to be played on ABC’s Nightline programme on Tuesday night and Good Morning America on Wednesday.