Ferguson protesters try to block highway, arrests made

More than 100 demonstrators tried to block a U.S. highway and some were arrested in clashes with authorities on Wednesday in a protest over the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teen by a white policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, police said.

Protesters sitting or standing in the road around Interstate 70 on-ramps near where Michael Brown, 18, was shot and killed by Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9 were arrested, St. Louis County Police spokesman Brian Schellman said.

At one point, a bottle and brick were thrown at police, Schellman said.

Schellman did not know how many people had been arrested. The Missouri State Highway Patrol did not respond to requests for comment.

County and state officers closed the highway on-ramp to traffic and told demonstrators they could not hang signs on the overpass or enter the highway, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Organizers told the newspaper the protests involved Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s refusal to replace the St. Louis County prosecutor investigating the fatal shooting.

“They are not going to allow us to get on the highway as we planned. But we did tie them up for a few hours,” St. Louis lawyer Eric Vickers told the paper in the late afternoon.

The protests came after Ferguson city leaders confronted demands for reform from an angry crowd on Tuesday night at their first public meeting since Brown’s death.

The shooting fueled a national debate on race relations in the United States after nightly protests descended at times into violence and rioting in Ferguson.