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News Helicopter and the Screwdriver

:::caution Nobody here is accused of wrongdoing This page compares reported courtroom testimony with public aerial footage as described by citizen reviewers. Timing gaps, battery failures, and small objects from altitude explain most discrepancies without any misconduct. Officer Bagley is a living witness, not a suspect. :::

Citizen investigators keep returning to one aerial check: a news helicopter — commonly identified as KSL — filmed the Losee Center roof after the shooting. Reviewers say that footage shows no yellow crime-scene tape at the railing where a screwdriver was supposedly protected, and that no screwdriver is visible on the gravel from the air. That claim is the public counterweight to reported testimony that Officer Chris Bagley found a screwdriver past the railing and taped the area.

The physical-tool side of the same dispute is on The Screwdriver and the Crime-Scene Tape. This page isolates the helicopter / aerial timing problem.

What Bagley Is Reported to Have Said​

Public hearing notes and X narration (including @JGlasseir summarizing testimony) describe Bagley as:

  • Reaching the roof around 12:44 p.m. (about 21 minutes after the ~12:23 shot).
  • Noticing a red-and-black screwdriver roughly 10–20 feet past the guardrail, "out of place."
  • Observing disturbed gravel consistent with a prone position.
  • Putting up yellow crime-scene tape around the southwest roof area and access point.
  • Having a body-worn camera that was recording on arrival but later died on battery while he was still on the roof — see Officer Bagley body cam and Bagley bodycam gap (claims).

If that testimony is accurate, there should be a window when tape is present at the railing and the tool is on the roof surface.

What Citizen Reviewers Say the Helicopter Shows​

Sam Parker (@BasedSamParker, July 29, 2026):

"Officer Bagley testified he put up yellow crime scene tape at the railing to protect the screwdriver evidence, but the KSL helicopter showed conclusively that there was no crime scene tape around the railing, and no screwdriver can be seen on their footage, either."

Similar claims appear in hearing-watch threads: "according to footage released, no yellow crime scene tape and no screwdriver either."

Two sub-claims must stay separate:

  1. Tape at the railing — a large, high-contrast object that aerial video should resolve if present at that moment.
  2. Screwdriver on gravel — a hand tool; absence from helicopter video is weak evidence either way from circling altitude.

Timing Is the Entire Case​

Aerial footage is a single pass (or a few orbits) over a scene that changes for hours.

  • Bagley arrives ~12:44. Tape placement, if it happened, starts then or later.
  • Helicopter time is not fixed in the public claim set — morning/afternoon of Sept 10 is often stated without a second-accurate clock.
  • If the helicopter flew before tape went up, "no tape" is expected.
  • If it flew after and still shows no tape at the railing Parker means, then either tape was never there, was moved, or the review is looking at the wrong edge of the roof.

Scene photos with orange evidence markers and yellow tape near the courtyard walkway (not necessarily the railing) appear in Parker's media set — consistent with processing, not with a single continuous state.

Why Skeptics Care​

The screwdriver is the tool that allegedly explains on-roof rifle assembly. If aerial video and body-cam both fail to document the discovery window, the assembly narrative rests harder on after-the-fact testimony and lab DNA rather than contemporaneous video. That is a documentation quality argument — central to disclosure demands in the Fix laws section — not automatic proof of a planted tool.

Opposing posts on X still treat DNA on the screwdriver and towel as decisive. Those claims and the defense challenges to DNA methods belong in court pages, not as settled science here.

What Would Settle This​

  • Timecoded full KSL (or other) aerial of the roof for Sept 10 afternoon.
  • Evidence log entry for screwdriver: time, GPS/description of location, collector, photo numbers.
  • Scene-processing stills showing tape lines at the railing, with EXIF or evidence timestamps.
  • Body-cam file metadata for Bagley's 27:35 recording end time relative to roof arrival.

Open Questions​

  1. Exact clock time of the helicopter pass(es) over Losee Center.
  2. Was tape placed at the railing, the access point, the courtyard, or all three?
  3. How long after discovery was the screwdriver photographed in place versus collected?
  4. Does any camera — campus or aerial — show Bagley on the roof during the discovery window?

The Chopper 5 Clip Itself​

A thirteen-second segment of the KSL Chopper 5 aerial — posted July 30, 2026 by @Villgecrazylady and described by her as filmed "about an hour after" the shooting — is now on the site with the footage playable: Chopper 5 Over the Losee Center Roof.

In that clip the news helicopter did not see any screwdriver on the roof, and no yellow tape is visible at the railing. Her own argument from it is a different one — that the disturbance in the roof gravel sits significantly farther back from the edge than the state's account describes, which she reads as consistent with a firing position roughly ten feet back. Both readings are hers and both are eyeball estimates from a moving helicopter without a scale reference; the timing caveats set out above apply to this clip as much as to any other aerial pass.

See also in this section​

X.com posts:​

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

Interesting​