Press Report: The Excavator Operator Encounter
What This Image Shows
A screenshot of several paragraphs of newspaper reporting, captured as an image.
The text reads that "Police activity early on centered around a house owned by the university that is under construction, with local residents seeing officers and dogs searching the property." It quotes Dylan Hope, 26, one of the construction workers, saying his crew heard "a loud crack come from campus," and that minutes later an excavator operator on the site encountered a young man who said there had been a shooting — an encounter that came "almost immediately after the shooting, before any police officers arrived." Hope quotes the man: "He said somebody had been shot, and he was just trying to get home safe... He seemed calm and stuff. He was shocked that someone had been shot." About an hour later, officers showed the crew a photograph of a man they believed matched the description the excavator operator had given. The excerpt ends with the line that Hope said the photo officers showed the crew on Wednesday "did not seem to look like the one the F.B.I. released to the public" afterwards.
That last sentence is why this frame is filed with the shot-position material. Two different photographs were reportedly in circulation on two consecutive days, and a first-hand witness has said publicly that they did not appear to be the same person. Whether that reflects a genuine change of suspect, an image enhancement, or an ordinary failure of recollection is unresolved — no agency has published both images side by side to settle it.
See Broadcast Transcript: Dylan Hope Account, Enhanced Suspect Photos and Black-Clad Suspect Dropped.
Related Areas
- Cluster: The Shot and the Shooter Position
- Section: Real Killer
- All photo evidence: Photos