Elzie became involved in activism following the shooting of Michael Brown. On August 9, 2014, via Twitter, Elzie learned of Brown's death and that his body was left for hours in the street a short distance from her own childhood home. Mourning the recent death of her own mother, Elzie drove to the site of Brown's death and began tweeting about the scene she encountered. She became involved in protests and in organizing volunteers and donations, as well as in continuing to document events; in his book "They Can't Kill Us All", "Washington Post" reporter Wesley Lowery described Elzie as "the most prominent of the citizen journalists telling the story of Ferguson."