The day the parents of 18-year old Michael Brown were planning to take him to college was instead spent urging angry people to stop rioting after the unarmed young man was shot to death police in the middle of a street north of Saint Louis, Missouri.  It’s another case of an unarmed young black male being killed under shady circumstances.

The FBI opened its own investigation into exactly what happened on Saturday afternoon in the suburb of Ferguson.  Police say an officer confronted Brown and a friend as they walked down the street, and reportedly ordered them to the sidewalk.  From there, the accounts diverge.  Cops claim there was a struggle for officer’s gun.  But witnesses said Brown had his hands in the air when he was killed.

“He shot again, and once my friend felt that shot, he turned around and put his hands in the air and he started to get down,” said Dorian Johnson, the friend walking with Brown.  “But the officer still approached with his weapon drawn and fired several more shots.”

Another witness came to the balcony of her home when she heard the ruckus outside.

“I saw him turn around with his arms up in the air and they shot him in his face and chest and he went down unarmed,” Piaget Crenshaw said.

Police eventually admitted t hat Michael Brown did not have a gun at any time, even as officials claimed the shooting was ‘justified’.  Photos of Brown’s body bleeding out in the street made the rounds of social media.

By Saturday night, there was trouble in the mainly African-American town, with tense stand-offs between protestors demanding justice, and militarized, white, Middle American cops in hand-me-down war gear provided by the Department of Homeland Security in the paranoia that followed the 9/11 attacks more than a thousand miles away many years earlier.  By Sunday night, there were bricks going through store windows, burning, and looting.  Oh, and “Anonymous” is getting involved.

With more protests on Monday afternoon, Brown’s mother Leslie McSpadden urged people against retaliatory violence.

“I would not want them to get out there and use my son’s situation for their personal anger,” she said.  “That’s not what I want them to do.  We are out there marching for justice for my son and peace for my family.”

“He was a good boy,” said Brown’s father Michael Brown, Sr., who wore a shirt with his son’s photo on it.  “He didn’t deserve none of this.  We need justice for our son.”

“He was a big teddy bear,” McSpadden added.  “He touched everybody.  My son was the type of person that everybody flocked to him.  Everybody wanted to know about Michael.  Everybody wanted to be around Michael.”