Snack cakes notwithstanding, Trottie’s complaints about the unjustness of the death-sentencing process and the timing of his letter reminded me what I had been told by Roland Burrow, a soft-spoken black man who was part of the protests in Ferguson.

Burrow said that from his perspective, the black community of St. Louis would accept a grand jury’s decision not to indict the white officer who had killed the unarmed black teenager if the process was perceived as “fair.”

But what was fair about a teenager dying at the hands of a police officer when he was carrying no weapon? Burrow asked. That could not be worthy of a death sentence, he said.

It is exceedingly rare for a police officer to be charged with the use of deadly force in the United States. Over the previous decade, according to a Washington Post analysis, in more than three thousand cases of “death by cop,” fifty-four officers had been charged for killing someone in the line of duty, and just eleven of those cases ended in a conviction. In two-thirds of those cases, a white officer shot and killed a black person. In none of those cases did a black officer fatally shoot a white person.

Even when there’s video, it’s unlikely for a cop to face trial. And in the Brown case, there was no video, making the possibility that Officer Wilson would be indicted slim to none. Justified or not.

With the embers still warm and the smell of gas still fresh, Burrows and I both knew then how this thing would play out in the courtroom and consequently the streets of middle America. Fair or not.