St. Louis-area schools will get notice of grand jury decision: letter

By Scott Malone FERGUSON Mo. (Reuters) - A suburban St. Louis school district told parents that it expects to receive at least three hours' notice from prosecutors when a grand jury decides whether to charge a white police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri. Officials and residents around Ferguson, which was torn by weeks of sometimes violent protests following the Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown, 18, were braced on Friday for a report from the grand jury, which has been meeting in secret for weeks and is expected to decide before the month's end whether to charge officer Darren Wilson. The superintendent of the Hazelwood, Missouri, school district, which is adjacent to Ferguson, said in a letter posted to the district's website that the St. Louis County Prosecutor's Office had told districts it would provide them with three hours' notice if the grand jury reaches its decision on a weekday, and 24 hours' notice if it comes on a weekend. "The three-hour window will allow us enough time to transport students home safely," Superintendent Grayling Tobias said. A spokesman for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Signs of preparation for the grand jury's decision could be seen around the area, with businesses along the Ferguson street that saw the worst of the August unrest keeping boards on their windows and some shops near the Ferguson Police Department also beginning to board up their fronts. "There's probably an unrealistic expectation of violence," St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar told St. Louis Public Radio on Friday. "We hope that when this starts and when we have our peaceful demonstrators ... the police officers are going to look similar to what it looks like at a Cardinal (baseball) game, hanging out making sure everybody's safe." In the same interview, St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said officers have been trained in de-escalation techniques to calm down any potentially volatile situation. On Thursday private pathologist Dr. Michael Baden testified to the grand jury. Baden, hired by Brown's family in part to try to determine whether Brown was trying to surrender when he was shot, has said Brown was shot at least six times, twice in the head. Witness accounts of the shooting have conflicted. Some described a struggle between Brown and Wilson and others said Brown put his hands up. (Reporting by Scott Malone; Additional reporting by Fiona Ortiz; Editing by Bill Trott and Eric Beech)