Skip to main content
← Ballistics and the Gun

ATF Photos of Six Engraved Cartridges

Six panel forensic photo grid each showing a bottlenecked rifle cartridge beside a yellow forensic ruler with a handwritten case label above it Next Image

What This Image Shows​

A six-panel forensic sheet, each panel showing a single bottlenecked rifle cartridge lying beside a yellow forensic ruler with a handwritten paper label above it. The labels read 2025-W-000401(1) with the initials SK and the date 09/11/25, marked Lab 4 / ATF 4 on two panels and Lab 5 / ATF 5 on the remaining four.

The brass casings carry hand-scribed markings. The clearest of them reads Bella Ciao; others are partly legible strings of letters and numbers, and one appears to reference a band name. These are the engravings that became one of the most-discussed elements of the charging documents, and the ATF summary reported that the marks are consistent with having been made using a rotary tool such as a Dremel.

What the engravings mean, and who put them there, has never been explained on the public record. Researchers have asked why anyone would take the time to inscribe cartridges at all, and have pointed out that the phrases read as culturally legible slogans rather than as anything operationally useful — which cuts both ways in the argument about whether the scene was staged or the act of one person. The forensic record is at ATF Fragment Inconclusive and Rifle Fingerprints Mismatch; the companion laboratory sheet is in this cluster.

This website's author is @HolonCitizen on X and YouTube/@HolonCitizen. Follow me there.

Where This Image Appears​

This image is used on the following investigation pages:

More In This Cluster​