Dan Merrell on the Call to Pave the Courtyard
What This Video Is
A one-minute-twelve excerpt from a longer podcast interview, circulated on X by @ShadowofEzra on May 21, 2026. The speaker is Dan Merrell, operator of Hardscape Utah, the contractor whose crew laid pavers over the Utah Valley University courtyard on Sunday, September 14, 2025 — four days after the shooting.
The production is simple: a bald man in a white crewneck sitting in a chair against a black panelled wall, warmly lit, talking to an interviewer just off camera. The edit cuts once to the interviewer listening. There is no narration, no graphics and no B-roll.
This clip matters because it is first-hand. Merrell is not analysing footage or relaying a rumour. He is describing what he says he was asked to do, by whom, and what he says he was told about who wanted it done. He is also, on this account, not accused of anything — he is a contractor who took a job.
What Is Said
Merrell speaks throughout, in a plain and somewhat frustrated register, with one expletive edited out below.
Why he took the job. "When I got the call, I thought -- you better believe it, I'm gonna go help. That was all it was: I'm going to go help these guys. He's asking for help. They want to do it right. He framed it in the sense that, hey, we want this to be done right. So that's why I showed up."
The technical point. He describes standard practice: "to do pavers correctly, you over-excavate, you get rid of the top... you want to get a good base." He agrees emphatically when the interviewer presses the point. This is the sentence that connects the clip to the wider question about how much material was removed from the courtyard and when, because over-excavation removes exactly the surface layer that would carry physical traces.
Who he says called him. He describes an improvised chain of command: "these guys had kind of, you know, there was two guys in charge and a ragtag crew. One of the guys was in charge of a state-owned facility in American Fork. And the other guy was a maintenance groundskeeper on a facility in Provo. And these are the two guys I'm corresponding with."
Neither man is named in the clip, and this page does not name them.
The line the clip travelled for. Merrell then relays what he says the second contact told him:
"The second guy that I hadn't talked to on the phone basically said, hey, look, we're not talking to anybody, we're not saying anything to the media. He says this is above our pay grade. The FBI and the state, the governor and the FBI. That's what they told me. The governor and the FBI said they want this done by Monday and we need to get it done."
That sentence needs reading carefully, because it is easy to compress into something it does not say. It is Merrell reporting what an unnamed state employee told him he had been told. It is third-hand. Merrell does not claim to have spoken to anyone at the FBI or the governor's office, and does not claim to have seen any order.
Neither the Utah governor's office nor the FBI has confirmed issuing such an instruction, and this site does not assert that either did. What the clip establishes is narrower and still substantial: that the contractor who did the work understood it to be urgent, understood a deadline of Monday to be in force, and understood the people who called him to believe the request came from above them.
What The Footage Shows
An interview and nothing else. Two camera positions, one cut, seventy-two seconds. No site footage, no photographs of the courtyard, no work order, no invoice, no correspondence.
Everything factual in the clip is spoken. There is no document on screen and no corroborating material of any kind, which is worth stating plainly given how widely the "governor and FBI" line has been quoted. The clip is a source for what Merrell says; it is not a source for what he was told, and it is not a source for what was actually decided.
One further point of context that the clip does not supply: by the wider record, Merrell's crew was the second phase of work. The courtyard had already been dug out by a different, unidentified crew before he arrived. Nothing in these seventy-two seconds covers that earlier excavation.
How It Connects
- Daniel Merrell and Hardscape Utah — the full treatment of his account.
- UVU Pavers — the paving itself, with the verbatim transcription and post metrics.
- Paving Timeline, Sept 14 — the four-day sequence from shooting to pavers.
- Dirt Removed Before the Pavers — the earlier excavation this clip does not cover.
- Site Alteration Evidence — what changing the site means for physical evidence.
- Cover-Up — where the scene-alteration questions sit in the wider argument.
- Crime Scene Paving — the federal-handling angle.
- @ShadowofEzra — the account that circulated the excerpt.