FERGUSON, Mo. — At Spencer’s Bakery near the barricaded police station here, there have been fewer Thanksgiving orders, including for pumpkin pie.
Across the region, school administrators are debating whether to start their holiday recesses early because of the potential for unrest.
And in Clayton, the affluent hub of the St. Louis County justice system, guests at the Crowne Plaza hotel coped with heightened security precautions: restricted access to the building, and the shuttering of the restaurant that faces the street and the courthouse. The breakfast buffet was relegated to an out-of-the-way ballroom.
The Thanksgiving season — and for many, life itself — is in limbo in this region as people wait to learn whether a grand jury will indict a white police officer in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown.
With boarded-up shops, police barricades and eerily quiet streets, it was as if people were preparing for a terrible blizzard and Y2K, all at once. A weekend when many had expected a decision by the grand jury became instead a weekend of uncertainty, with no word from the courthouse and confusion over how individuals and institutions should respond, or not respond, when nothing had really happened yet.
Clayton High School scrapped plans for a weekend debate tournament after teams opted not to participate because of concern that unrest might result if the grand jury decides not to charge Darren Wilson, the officer who fatally shot Mr. Brown, 18, in August.
Nearby, officials with Christian Hospital were fending off rumors that they were preparing for mass casualties, and that three floors had been cleared out for victims of rioting: one floor for wounded police officers, one for protesters and one for relatives of police officers. No such action has taken place, a spokesman for the hospital said.
And the Ultimate Defense Firing Range and Training Center, about 22 miles west of Ferguson in St. Peters, which typically sells three to five guns daily, has lately been selling 20 to 30. The owner rented off-site facilities to handle the demand for entry-level training courses. Seven additional workers were brought in. On Saturday, there was a waiting list for shooters to use the 18-lane firing range.
There’s so much rumor that the announcement was coming out this weekend, I think people are in that last-chance panic mode, said Paul R. Bastean, the owner of Ultimate Defense. My customers and my clients are not looking for trouble, but they’re preparing for if trouble comes to them.
Some people were beginning to wonder whether the long and tense wait for a grand jury decision might be worse than what actually follows.
Spencer’s Bakery, which Louis Spencer’s family has run in Ferguson for nearly 29 years, had not boarded up its windows, as several other shops had, but business was down about 30 percent.
I’m of two minds about it, said Mr. Spencer, 47, who has lived in Ferguson since his childhood. On one hand, the longer they wait, the longer you wait to see what might happen when they do say anything. On the other hand, you just want to get it out of the way and get back on with what’s normal.
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The grand jury, which has been meeting since Aug. 20 to consider whether there is probable cause that Officer Wilson committed a crime when he killed Mr. Brown, could make a decision in the next several days — perhaps as early as Monday. But no one knew for certain, and it remained unclear when the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, would make any decision public.
We don’t know when the storm is going to hit, said Patrick Green, the mayor of Normandy, a city of 5,000 near Ferguson. Will it hit in four hours or hit in 12 hours? There seems to be a great deal of uncertainty over how, when and where they’re going to deliver this.
There were increasing signs Sunday that the authorities had geared up for the grand jury to return a decision at any time. On Saturday, some police officers in Ferguson moved to longer, 12-hour shifts, and officers staffed a multi-jurisdiction command post in a shopping center in neighboring Jennings, a few blocks from where protests took place after the shooting.
Since the law enforcement authorities had already ramped up operations, some with knowledge of the case said an anticipated 48-hour waiting period before announcing the grand jury’s decision might have been called off. A decision could be announced on the day it is reached, they said.
Prosecutors have taken the unusual step of saying they will seek the release of evidence and witness testimony heard by the grand jury if no indictment is returned. But court officials said on Sunday that a judge had not yet agreed to release of those records.
Also on Sunday, Benjamin Crump, a lawyer representing the family of Mr. Brown, said in an interview that the St. Louis County prosecutor should charge Officer Wilson and proceed to a trial, rather than leave the decision to the grand jurors.
In my almost 20 years of practicing law I’ve never seen a process like this where you don’t have the prosecutor recommending any charges to a grand jury that he’s convened and you don’t have any direction, Mr. Crump said. It just boggles the mind that he thinks this is fair.
Mr. Crump spoke after another night of peaceful but at times tense demonstrations in Ferguson. Protesters blocked traffic for a time Saturday night on two major roads in the St. Louis suburb, West Florissant Avenue and South Florissant Road, leading to two arrests for unlawful assembly, the authorities said. In one tense moment, protesters blocking traffic outside the police station surrounded a canine-unit vehicle. Lt. Jerry Lohr and other officers with the St. Louis County Police walked into the crowd surrounding the vehicle and asked protesters to move back to the sidewalk. Protesters obliged, if only temporarily.
They have a right to protest and have their voice heard, Lieutenant Lohr said. I’m just trying to balance.
The logistics of waiting — whether to proceed with business as usual or to cancel or alter usual routines — are complex, and schools were grappling with some of the biggest problems.
Students at Normandy High School, where Mr. Brown graduated in May, were expected to be in class for a regular school day Monday. But students at Jennings Senior High, five miles north, have the day off, after the Jennings School District extended its Thanksgiving break and shut its eight schools for the entire week.
Now that the weekend has passed without a grand jury decision, schools that planned to be open on Monday and Tuesday face a quandary. Students may be sent home early if a decision is announced during either school day.
In October, several superintendents in the area asked Mr. McCulloch, the prosecutor, to avoid announcing the grand jury’s decision during the school day, citing concerns that demonstrations might affect travel routes to and from school. The superintendents told Mr. McCulloch in a letter that they preferred that the announcement be made on a Sunday. School officials said they had received no promises that their request would be honored, only that it would be taken into consideration.
In the high-poverty Jennings School District, the superintendent, Tiffany Anderson, said it had decided to announce on Friday that schools would be closed Monday and Tuesday in part because if we make an announcement on Sunday, some of our families don’t have phones or TVs. In addition, many children in the district walk to school.
We don’t have buses, so that would mean our kids would be walking across West Florissant, which is where the activity is, Ms. Anderson said.
Reporting was contributed by Monica Davey, Julie Bosman, Mitch Smith, Brent McDonald and John Eligon.
