A mystery has developed over the online legal defense fund pages for officer Darren Wilson. Wilson is the Ferguson, Missouri, cop who shot and killed unarmed teenager Michael Brown in early August. The shooting garnered national attention and multiple websites were set up for Ofc. Wilson’s legal defense.
An estimated $400,000 was raised from online donors. Now this past weekend, all the legal defense fund pages have been taken down. Organizers have not issued a statement on why these pages were removed. In addition, related Facebook pages have been deleting comments from those who want to know where the money has gone from all the donations. The online fundraising site “Gofundme.com” had two pages setup in support of Wilson. The pages were ‘Support Officer Darren Wilson’ and ‘Support Officer Wilson.’ The pages had raised $235,750 and $197,500 respectively. The online pages for Wilson donors had extensive racist comments left by individuals, exposing the racist nature of the core support group of Wilson. On both pages, donations seem to have stopped around the same time on Saturday, if a visitor tries to leave a donation a message now appears that says “Donations are complete! The organizer has stopped donations.”
A spokeswoman for GoFundMe.com issued the following statement “Each and every GoFundMe campaign organizer is able to decide for themselves when they would like to stop accepting donations. Organizers may also choose to begin accepting donations again at a later date.”
In contrast, a similar page for Michael Brown’s family, which is run by the family’s attorney Benjamin Crump, had raised a total of $316,194 as of Monday afternoon. Now, the organizers of the donation pages for Darren Wilson are urging their donors to sign a petition to shut down the donation page for Michael Brown. Darren Wilson is still under investigation awaiting the decision of a grand jury as to whether or not he will face charges in the Michael Brown shooting.
