As federal civil rights investigators and the FBI carry out their own inquiry into the controversial case, tensions are running high in Ferguson, where there's a history of distrust between the predominately black community and the largely white police force...
...Dorian Johnson, 22, told CNN that he and Brown were walking in the middle of the street when a white male officer pulled up and told them, "Get the f*** on the sidewalk." The young men replied that they were "not but a minute away from our destination, and we would shortly be out of the street," Johnson said.
The officer drove forward but stopped and backed up, almost hitting the pair, Johnson said.
"We were so close, almost inches away, that when he tried to open his door aggressively, the door ricocheted both off me and Big Mike's body and closed back on the officer," Johnson said.
Still in his car, the officer then grabbed Brown by his neck, Johnson said. Brown tried to pull away, but the officer kept pulling Brown toward him, he said.
The officer drew his weapon, and "he said, 'I'll shoot you' or 'I'm going to shoot' " and almost instantaneously fired his weapon, hitting Brown, Johnson said.
Johnson and a bloodied Brown took off running, and Johnson hid behind the first car he saw, he said. The officer got out of his car.
"I saw the officer proceeding after my friend Big Mike with his gun drawn, and he fired a second shot and that struck my friend Big Mike," Johnson told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "And at that time, he turned around with his hands up, beginning to tell the officer that he was unarmed and to tell him to stop shooting. But at that time, the officer firing several more shots into my friend, and he hit the ground and died."
"We wasn't committing any crime, bringing no harm to nobody, but my friend was murdered in cold blood," he told KMOV.
That Brown was unarmed is undisputed -- St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said every casing found at the scene was from the officer's weapon -- but he said at a Sunday news conference that Brown was not an innocent victim.
"The genesis of this was a physical confrontation," Belmar said, adding that Ferguson police asked his office to investigate the case.
