The Affidavit: Photographing a Roommate's Screen
Probable-cause affidavit page. Signed /S/ Davis, Brian; PC entered 09/12/2025 07:18. Full write-up →
Everything in the message case starts here, in the affidavit's own words. It is worth reading slowly, because the document describes its own evidentiary weakness without appearing to notice.
The passage
"Investigators identified an individual as the roommate of Robinson. Investigators interviewed the roommate, who stated that his roommate (referring to Robinson) made a joke on discord. Investigators asked if he would show them the messages on discord, he opened it and showed several messages to investigators and allowed investigators to take photos of the screen as each message was shown by Robinson's roommate. These photos consisted of various messages, including content of messages between the phone contact name 'Tyler' with an emoji icon, and Robinson's roommate's device."
The affidavit then lists what those messages referenced: needing to retrieve a rifle from a drop point, leaving the rifle in a bush, and having changed outfits.
Four problems visible on the face of the document
1. The evidence is a photograph of somebody else's screen. Not a forensic image, not an export. A camera pointed at a phone held by a witness, who controlled which messages appeared and in what order — "as each message was shown by Robinson's roommate."
2. The platform label is wrong, or Discord is wrong. The affidavit says Discord. Discord says the planning content was not on Discord. The affidavit's own description — messages between "the phone contact name 'Tyler' with an emoji icon" and the roommate's device — describes a phone contact, which is SMS language, not Discord language. Discord does not have phone contacts.
3. The attribution is a contact name. "Tyler" with an emoji is a label the roommate's phone applied. It establishes what the device called the sender. It does not establish who held the sending device.
4. "Made a joke on discord." That is how the roommate first characterised it. The document moves from joke to confession without recording what changed.
The surrounding narrative in the same affidavit
The page also records the tip route — on the evening of September 11 a family member reached out to a family friend, who contacted the Washington County Sheriff's Office, relayed to Utah County and the FBI — and the UVU surveillance description of a grey Dodge Challenger arriving at approximately 08:29 on September 10.
Booking data at the foot of the page: Arrest Date/Time 09/12/2025 04:00, PC entered 09/12/2025 07:18, OTN 70090584, sworn by Officer Brian Davis.
That 04:00 arrest stamp sits against the Bates-stamped video showing Robinson Mirandized at 6:25 PM on September 11 — roughly ten hours earlier. See Bates 003996-R2.
Research needs
- The photographs themselves, in sequence, with EXIF.
- Whether the roommate's device was ever forensically imaged — and if so, why the state has said it will not offer forensic extractions.
- Bodycam from the interview, showing which messages were shown and which were scrolled past.
The county that took him in says it never questioned him
One further statement belongs beside this affidavit, because it bears on which agency produced which record.
The Washington County Sheriff's Office has explicitly stated that it did not interview or question Robinson. Public reporting does not describe a formal police interrogation of Robinson on September 12 either; the questioning that did occur is attributed to the federal and state investigators who took custody at around 2:00 AM — at the end of his time at the Hurricane sheriff's office, during transport, or after booking in Utah County.
Set that against what this affidavit is: the confessions it relies on were made to family, to a roommate, and on Discord, before the surrender — not in a post-arrest police interview. There is no interrogation transcript underneath any of it. The state's account of Robinson's own words rests entirely on what other people showed investigators, and on two pages of chat attributed to the account zealous_monkey_55095.
It also raises a question this site cannot answer: if Washington County did not question him, whose recording is Bates 003996-R2, the video that shows him Mirandized at 6:25 PM and asking for a lawyer? A Miranda warning is not an interview, so both statements can be true at once. But the two records need reconciling, and no agency has reconciled them in public.
The Location Field Is Typed In. The IP Address Is Not.
On Discord, on Steam, and on every platform in this section, the country shown on a profile is a text box the user filled in. Anyone can type Utah, or Egypt, or nothing at all, and change it again in seconds. Whether it is shown publicly is a setting. It is not evidence of where a person was sitting when they typed a message.
What is not typed in is the IP address. Every session, every login, every message send is written to the platform's own logs with the address it arrived from, alongside device fingerprints and session timing. Discord holds that record for the servers named in the Utah State Bureau of Investigation's warrant — Craftopia, Gamin and The Corruption — and for the account that posted the confession.
That is the question this section keeps returning to: is it known where the people in these servers actually were? The FBI reportedly examined twenty or more people in Robinson's Discord circle and charged none of them, and nothing in the public record states where any of them were. To be explicit, because it matters: being in another country is not wrongdoing, no one in those servers has been accused by any authority of anything, and nothing on this site suggests any of them did anything improper. The point is narrower — that a location nobody has verified should not be treated as if it were verified, in either direction. Self-reported locations circulated widely — see the Egypt claim on a Steam profile — and self-reported locations are worthless.
The answer exists. It is in Discord's subpoena return and in the login-IP history for September 10–12 — records that investigators can obtain through lawful process and the public cannot. What we are asking for is that the record for the account that posted the confession be established through that process and, so far as the law allows, made public. Until it is, every claim of foreign involvement in these chats — and every denial — rests on a field somebody typed.
We are not asking anyone to identify, locate, contact or expose any private individual, and readers should not attempt it. We name no one and we accuse no one. This is a request for a record, not an allegation against a person.
Other Parts of the Discord Messages
Lance Twiggs — Immunity and Two Statements
A statement on September 11, a sworn statement in April 2026, and use-immunity from two prosecuting offices. Lance Twiggs has never been charged with anything.
Read this
Discord Handles Left in the Steam Comments
Visitors posted their own Discord handles on a public Steam wall. Handles are typed by hand; the accounts behind them resolve to IP addresses that are not.
Read this
The Phil Lyman Post Two Weeks Before
A Utah legislator engaged with a post about Discord radicalization two weeks before September 10. What a coincidence of that shape can and cannot carry.
Read this
One warrant, one confession, two different usernames. Page 5 says tylor/Ikum and page 7 shows zealous_monkey_55095, and nothing in the document reconciles them.
Read thisThe Steam Friend List May Matter More
Discord is where the confession appeared. Steam is where the friendships actually lived. A server can hold hundreds of people who have never spoken to each other; a friend list is chosen one person at a time, and the people on it are the ones you spend hundreds of hours in voice chat with, night after night, for years. If anyone in Robinson's online life knew him well enough to matter, they are likelier to be on that list than on a server roster.
The two circles overlap directly: visitors to the Steam profile posted their Discord handles on its public comment wall. And Steam stores exactly what Discord stores — the IP address each session came from — no matter what country a profile claims.
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