The Footage
The first piece of footage is nine minutes and four seconds long.
It begins in the middle of things, because that is how body cameras work: the officer presses the button and the device writes the previous thirty seconds out of its buffer, without audio, and then the audio comes up. So the first half minute is silent. A dashboard. A hand on a wheel. The green wash of a mounted screen. Then a click, and the world acquires sound.
Timestamp: 14 April, 23:48:11.
A traffic stop on a four-lane arterial with a Sonic on the corner, closed. The car ahead is a grey Nissan Altima with a bad left taillight, which is the reason on the citation and is a real reason. The officer’s voice says a plate number and a location. Dispatch reads it back.
At 23:49:02 he gets out. The camera drops and swings and steadies. The audio picks up wind and the tick of the hazards and the particular sound a duty belt makes when a man walks.
At 23:49:31 he is at the window and the window is already down.
“Evening. Reason I stopped you is your left rear light’s out.”
“Okay.”
“You know about that?”
“No, sir.”
“License and registration for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
The man in the car has both hands on the wheel at ten and two and does not move them. He says, “My wallet’s in the console.”
“Go ahead.”
He gets it. He hands over a license. The camera reads it for a fraction of a second: the state, the photograph, a date of birth that puts him at twenty-six.
“Registration?”
“Should be in the glove.”
“Go ahead.”
At 23:50:40 the officer walks back to the cruiser. This part is four minutes long. He runs the license. There is nothing. No warrant, no flag, no suspension. Dispatch says so, twice, clearly, and it is audible on the recording, and the jury heard it.
At 23:54:52 he starts back toward the Altima with the license and the registration in his left hand.
At 23:55:09 a phone rings inside the car.
You can hear it. It is not loud but it is unmistakable and it is on the recording — a default ringtone, the one that came with the phone.
At 23:55:11 the man in the driver’s seat leans to his right.
At 23:55:12 the officer says a word. The word is not distinct on the recording. Three separate audio analysts testified to three different transcriptions of it. Two said the word was hey. One said it was a name.
At 23:55:13 the officer’s left hand comes up, and because the camera is mounted on his chest the license and the registration fill the frame, and for six-tenths of a second the recording shows nothing at all but a Colorado driver’s license, very close, out of focus.
The audio continues.
Everything that happens next happens off frame in the time it takes to say a short sentence out loud.
At 23:55:20 the camera is pointing at the sky, then at asphalt, then at the open door of an Altima, and it stays there.
The phone is still ringing. It rings for another nine seconds and then stops, and then, at 23:55:44, it starts again, and it rings for the rest of the recording, and it is the only sound on the last two minutes of the tape besides a man’s breathing and the words shots fired and a location repeated twice.
The phone was in the driver’s-side door pocket. It was recovered there. The call log shows two missed calls from the same contact, at 23:55:09 and 23:55:44, and the contact was saved as Mom.
The second piece of footage is forty-one seconds long and has no sound.
It is a store camera, mounted high in the back left corner, angled down the length of the aisle toward the front door. The image is greenish and the frame rate is low enough that people move in small jumps.
Timestamp: 8 November, 18:19:44.
The store is empty except for the man behind the register, who is standing, and a young man who comes in through the door at 18:19:51 and lets the door close behind him.
He goes down the right-hand aisle. He is there for nineteen seconds. He takes something off a shelf at chest height — the frame is not good enough to say what, though the item was later photographed on the floor and entered into evidence — and he comes back up the aisle toward the register.
At 18:20:14 he is at the counter.
He puts the item down. He puts something else down beside it, small, and reaches into his front pocket.
The man behind the register does not move for two seconds.
At 18:20:19 the young man turns his head toward the door, which is a thing people do, and which the defense argued was one thing and the prosecution argued was another, and which the tape simply shows.
At 18:20:21 the man behind the register bends below the level of the counter.
At 18:20:23 the young man raises his left hand.
The next four seconds of this recording are not described here.
At 18:20:27 the frame contains one person.
At 18:20:41 the recording ends, because the system wrote in forty-one-second segments and the next segment begins a tenth of a second later and is not the same file, and the next segment is twelve minutes long and was also shown to the jury, and there is nothing in it that anyone needs.
What was on the counter, photographed in place at 19:40 that evening by a criminalist: one bag of chips, flamin’ hot, one dollar seventy-nine. Two dollars and fifteen cents in coins, in a small pile, as though counted out.
Both recordings were shown in full.
Both were played more than once, at the request of the defense in one case and the prosecution in the other. In Colorado the nine minutes were shown four times, twice at quarter speed. In California the forty-one seconds were shown fourteen times, and once frame by frame, with a technician advancing the image while an expert witness narrated what the pixels could and could not be said to contain.
This is the footage the jury watched.
This is the footage that wasn’t enough.
Aurora, Colorado — Friday, 2:14 p.m.
The jury is out for two days and comes back on a Friday afternoon, and Ray Daniels does not stand up straight until the second word.
There are two words that matter and the foreman says them in the wrong order for a person waiting on them. He says the charge first. The charge is long. It has a statute number in it and the words in the second degree and it takes seven seconds to get through, and for fifteen seconds Ray Daniels stands at a table in a grey suit his wife bought in January with his hands flat on the wood and does not breathe.
Then: not guilty.
His attorney’s hand lands between his shoulder blades. Somebody behind him makes a sound. Beth is in the second row and her face comes apart in a way that is not joy, exactly, and Ray sees it and files it somewhere he does not have to open right now.
He sits down because his legs do it.
The judge says things. There is a procedure to being finished with a man and the court performs it. The jury is thanked. The bond is exonerated. Somebody says the defendant is free to go, which is a sentence that gets said out loud in an American courtroom and means what it says.
Ray Daniels walked into that building afraid and he walks out of it free.
The corridor is the part nobody prepares you for.
It is a public building and there is one hallway and everybody has to use it. Second floor, terrazzo, benches along the wall, a water fountain, a sign about cell phones that everybody ignores. Ray comes out of Courtroom 4B with his attorney on one side and Carl Benavides from the union on the other, and there are maybe forty people in that hallway, and about a third of them are press, and about a third of them are court staff who have seen four hundred of these, and about a third of them are the family.
He has been told to go left, toward the elevators.
He goes left.
And at the water fountain, six feet from the elevator bank, standing with her purse in both hands and her coat over her arm, is Terrence Prather’s mother.
Her name is Yvonne. Ray knows it. He has heard it said in that building for nine days. She sat in the front row on the left every single day of the trial and she wore one of three jackets and she did not speak to a reporter once, and when Ray was on the stand for six hours over two days he could see the top of her head in his peripheral vision the entire time and he learned to organize his answers around not looking at it.
She is not crying. That is the first thing.
The second thing is that she does not move, and does not step back, and does not turn away, and does not say anything.
She looks at him.
That is all. She stands at a water fountain in a public hallway with her coat over her arm and she looks at Ray Daniels for the length of time it takes him to walk thirteen feet, which is about four seconds, and he looks back for the first two and a half of them because he cannot make himself do the thing he has done a thousand times in his career, which is to look through a person.
Then his attorney’s hand is on his elbow and the elevator is there.
The doors close.
Carl Benavides says, “Don’t,” and Ray says, “I’m not,” and neither of them says anything else on the way down.
The press is out front and they have been told he will not be making a statement, and his attorney makes it anyway, in the plaza, in the wind, for two minutes and ten seconds.
The attorney says the words vindicated and impossible situation and split second. He says the family’s loss is a tragedy and he says it in the tone people use for that sentence, which is a tone that has been sanded smooth by a great deal of use.
Ray stands slightly behind his left shoulder and looks at the middle distance and does not speak.
There is one shouted question. A woman from one of the local stations, close to the front, with her recorder up: “Officer Daniels — do you have anything you want to say to Mrs. Prather?”
Ray’s mouth opens.
He has thought about this. He has thought about it for eleven months and he has a version and it is not a bad version. His attorney told him in November that whatever he was carrying around, he was not to set it down in public until this was over, and it is over now, and the sentence is right there behind his teeth.
His attorney says, “That’s all, thank you,” and puts a hand on his back.
They go to the car.
In the car, on Colfax, at a light, Beth says, “Say something.”
“Like what.”
“Anything. Ray. It’s been ten minutes.”
He watches a man cross in front of the hood with a shopping cart.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he says.
Beth doesn’t answer. The light changes.
Ray Daniels believes that sentence completely. He has believed it since 23:55:13 on the fourteenth of April and he has never once, in eleven months, been able to hold it in his head at the same time as the phone ringing in the door pocket, and so he has developed the habit of holding one and then the other, in sequence, several times a day, the way you press a bruise.
He does it now, at a light on Colfax, and then it is green.
They go home. There are four cars on Nettleton Court that do not belong there and one of them has a camera on a tripod set up on the sidewalk, and Ray pulls into the garage and puts the door down behind them before he turns the engine off.
Aurora — the Previous April
Eight months earlier, on a Tuesday afternoon in April, Terrence Prather is arguing with a vending machine.
It is the machine in the second-floor break room at Meridian Medical Courier, and it has taken his dollar and given him nothing, and it does this to somebody roughly twice a week. There is a piece of paper taped to it that says OUT OF ORDER in a coworker’s handwriting and has said so since February, and everybody keeps using it anyway, because it works about eighty percent of the time and people are optimists.
“It ate it.”
“It eats everybody’s.”
“No, it ate it. It didn’t even try.” He hits the side of it with the flat of his hand, twice, without much conviction. “That’s theft. That’s a corporate crime.”
“Report it to HR.”
“I’m going to. I’m going to write a memo.”
He is twenty-six years old. He is five-nine and built like a man who used to play something and stopped. He has a lanyard on with his badge turned around backwards, which is against policy, and a fade that is four days past when he likes it, and a phone in his back pocket that buzzes about every ninety seconds because he is in three group chats and cannot bring himself to mute any of them.
He is a dispatcher. He routes couriers who move blood, tissue, specimens and organs between ten facilities across the Front Range, and he is good at it in a way that is invisible when done well and catastrophic when done badly. He has been there four years. He is up for a lead spot in the fall and he thinks he is going to get it and he is right.
He gets his dollar back out of the coin return, which is a thing that happens sometimes, and holds it up.
“Justice,” he says.
At 3:40 he takes his fifteen and goes out to the loading dock because it is the only place with sun.
He calls his mother. He calls his mother most days at 3:40 because that is when she takes hers, and they have been doing this since he was twenty and she is the one who set it up and neither of them has ever remarked on it.
“You eat?”
“Ma.”
“That’s a no.”
“I had a thing.”
“A thing.”
“There was a bagel situation.”
Yvonne Prather says, “Mm,” in a way that conveys a complete position on bagels, and then she tells him about a woman at her job who has taken to microwaving fish, and he laughs at the right places, and she asks about the kids.
The kids are four and one. The four-year-old is named Amiya and has recently decided she is a doctor and has been diagnosing the household. The one-year-old is named Terrence and everybody calls him Little T and he has sixteen words, of which four are no.
“Amiya told me I have a broken heart,” Terrence says. “She had the little plastic thing. She listened to my chest for like a full minute, real serious, and then she goes: it’s broke.”
His mother laughs so hard she has to put the phone down.
“Then she gave me a Band-Aid. On my elbow. For my heart.”
“Where’d she get a Band-Aid?”
“Ma, she has a supply.”
They talk for five more minutes, which is four minutes longer than his break, and he says he has to go and she says all right and then keeps talking for two more minutes, which is also a thing they do.
Before she hangs up she says, “You need anything?”
“I’m good.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Ma. I’m good.”
“All right,” she says. “Call me.”
He works until seven. He picks up Little T from his sister’s on the way home because Chantel has class Tuesday nights, and he does the bath, which is a forty-minute operation involving negotiation, and he reads Amiya two books and she argues for a third and he gives her a third.
At 9:30 he sits on the end of the couch with his shoes still on and does nothing for twenty minutes, which is the only four minutes in the day that belong to him.
He is diabetic. Type 1, diagnosed at fourteen. He has a pump and a sensor and an app on his phone that beeps at him, and the beeping is one of the reasons his phone is never far from his hand and never on silent.
He has a car with a bad left taillight. He knows about the taillight. He has known about it for three weeks. He has a part on order from a place in Commerce City that keeps saying Thursday, and he has told two people at work that he needs to get it done before he gets a ticket, and he means to, and it is the kind of thing that stays on a list.
None of this is a story. This is a Tuesday in April, and Terrence Prather spends it the way anybody spends a Tuesday.
The last thing he does before bed, at 11:40, is text his mother a picture of Amiya asleep on the floor next to the dog, having refused the bed on principle.
Yvonne Prather is already asleep and does not see it until the morning.
In the morning she saves it to the folder on her phone where she keeps the ones of the kids, which by now runs to about four thousand pictures and which she has never once gone back through.