CNN — Two police officers were shot in Ferguson early Thursday morning, just hours after the city’s police chief resigned.
“These police officers were standing there, and they were shot just because they were police officers,” St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said.
But neither of those struck was from the Ferguson Police Department. One, a 14-year veteran of the St. Louis County Police Department, was shot in the shoulder. The other, a 7-year veteran of the Webster Groves Police Department, was struck in the face, Belmar said.
The officers were in serious condition Thursday morning. It’s not clear who the shooter was.
Police from an array of jurisdictions in Missouri were in Ferguson keeping an eye on the protestors at the time.
Several protesters said the shooter was not near the crowd of demonstrators, but was up on a grassy hill.
The gunman was “no less than 100 feet” away, protester Kayla Reed said.
Belmar said police have been fortunate that such a shooting hasn’t happened until now.
“But I have said all along that we cannot sustain this forever without problems,” the county police chief said. “That’s not an indictment on everybody that’s out there, certainly expressing their First Amendment rights. But we have seen, in law enforcement, that this is a very, very, very dangerous environment for the officers to work in.”
From calm to chaos
Some demonstrators gathered Wednesday night at the Ferguson Police Department to cheer the resignation of Police Chief Thomas Jackson.
Others amassed there to demand more: the disbanding of the entire police department and the resignation of Mayor James Knowles, protester DeRay McKesson told CNN.
“Racist cops have got to go,” some chanted.
By midnight the crowd had thinned out, ready to call it a night, when gunfire erupted.
“All of a sudden, I heard at least four or five shots ring out,” witness Markus Loehrer said.
“It took me at least 30 seconds of watching before I realized there was an officer down. We are not there to shoot cops; we don’t like violence. So we did what anybody would do — we ran away.”
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