Tia Carrie is as sweet a teenage girl as you can image.

Nothing about her — not her big smile wired with colorful braces, or her florescent pink sweatshirt and elaborately dressed hair — would make you think she is angry.

But she is “damn angry.”

It showed on Wednesday night only when the 17-year-old was facing down a line of police officers alongside her friend Jasmine Thompson, 19, at a rally in this inner suburb of St. Louis to protest the killing of yet another black teenager.

On Tuesday, Antonio Martin, 18, was shot and killed by a Berkeley police officer, just a few miles from Ferguson, where Michael Brown was killed in August. Police say Martin pulled and aimed a gun at the officer.

Martin was at a Mobil gas station with his girlfriend at the time. Authorities said that an officer responding to a robbery call got out of his vehicle and approached them, at which point the teen pulled out a 9mm handgun.

“Fearing for his life, the Berkeley officer fired several shots, striking the subject, fatally wounding him,” Berkeley police said in a statement. The police say that surveillance video from three cameras corroborates the officer’s story.

But Carrie isn’t buying it. “There’s no part of those videos that shows [Martin] with a gun,” she said.

Carrie’s words resonated with several others at the rally and echoed those of even more among the community’s youth.

Her parents, however, “they believe the police and the TV news.”

“They’re brainwashed by the media,” added Carrie, who joined some 60 protesters Wednesday night in shutting down Interstate 170 and marching through the town’s streets. “My parents don’t come out here to see for themselves what’s happening. I see it, and it’s [the police] who’s killing us.”

As the style of protesting has become more confrontational, a generational divide has appeared.

Carrie’s parents don’t allow her out to protest because they don’t believe in the methods employed by increasingly radical young protesters who on Wednesday night shouted down police mere inches from their faces and at times hurled sticks and bottles into their ranks. Several protesters were maced by police after defying officers’ requests to move to the side of the interstate. Later, as police chased down a group who had shattered the windows of a beauty salon, shots were fired into the air.

Activists and community leaders say her situation is indicative of the split between old and young here and the way in which they view the protests — especially in Berkeley this week — after the killings of Brown and two other young black men.

The death of Martin — justified as the police claim, or not — has ignited passions, much like after the killings of Brown and two other young black men.

On Aug. 19, Kajieme Powell, 25, was shot and killed by two St. Louis city officers when he moved toward them with a knife. Vonderrit Myers, 18, was shot eight times and killed by an off-duty St. Louis police officer during a physical confrontation on Oct. 8.

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SOURCE: Christopher Miller
Mashable