Prominent Ferguson protester Darren Seals found dead in a burned car

Darren Seals, a prominent Ferguson protester leader, was found shot to death in a car that was burned Tuesday morning.

Protester Darren Seals killed

The 29-year-old’s death sent waves of shock and grief throughout the community of activists in Missouri who protested the police killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014.

“We have lost a great champion of civil rights in our community,” said Bassem Masri, a friend who had live-streamed the Ferguson protests, sometimes with Seals walking behind him to protect him as he filmed.

“He didn’t go out to the national level like many of the organizers. He stayed home and tried to fix Ferguson first,” said Keith Rose, another St Louis activist.

Other activists killed

Many have been at a lost over Seals death troubled over the comparison between his death and the 2014 murder of 20-year-old Deandre Joshua, who was shot and left in a burning car on the same night a grand jury chose not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in Brown’s death.

An anonymous activist pointed to a striking revelation. According to the activist’s count, five other men in the St. Louis area have been shot and left in burning cars since 2014.

“Many people are really worried. We don’t know if there’s some type of movement serial killer on the loose,” said Patricia Bynes to The Guadarian, a protester and former Democratic committeewoman for Ferguson.

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“There are no connections to the two homicides that we know of at this time,” St Louis county police spokesman Shawn McGuire said in an email Wednesday.

About Darren Seals

Darren Seals was a proud local activist and a fierce critic of the national Black Lives Matter movement. He had criticized the Black Lives Matter movement saying its prominent leaders took over the Ferguson protests and then failed to give enough back to the community that had catalyzed the movement. During a heated argument, he once hit Deray McKesson, one of the most nationally recognized movement activists.

Seals was mentoring young hip-hop artists and recently switched to a lower-paying shift at his job at General Motors in order to give him more time to do community work and take care of his mother and brother.

He had also continued to document his own stops by local law enforcement,posting a video on Facebook in June describing an encounter he and his 14-year-old brother had with the police in which he said a detective had asked him about a Facebook post he had made about Trump.

“Me and my little brother just got slammed, guns pointed at our faces, and detained by Ferguson PD for being activist against Trump,” he wrote on Facebook.

Darren Seals, who lived in St. Louis, was found by county police in Riverview, one of the dozens of tiny municipalities that surround the city.