When police in Ferguson, Missouri launched tear gas into the crowd protesting the police shooting there in 2014, Edward Crawford, then 25, went for a cannister and threw it back and kept ahold of his bag of chips.
The image of that moment raced around the world, thanks to Robert Cohen, a photographer for the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
“This image has the life it has because of the shirt he’s wearing,” Cohen said. “This would have just been a quick conversation on Twitter,” he said about what would have been the reaction without the shirt.
Crawford is dead, Cohen reported via Twitter today.
Protester featured in iconic #Ferguson photo found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wound https://t.co/PygNB3XxBZ
— Robert Cohen (@kodacohen) May 5, 2017