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The Music-Backed Edit of the Man Cheering in the Crowd

What This Video Is

Twenty-two seconds, reposted by the account John Basham under a headline announcing a "Newly Discovered Crowd Video Of A Man CELEBRATING IMMEDIATE…". It is one of three near-identical items in this section, all derived from the same underlying crowd footage of the UVU event, each re-cut and re-posted by a different account within about a day of each other.

This is the most heavily processed of the three, and the processing matters. It is not a continuous clip. It is a fast-cut assembly: repeated short shots of one young man reacting, intercut with close-ups of the event tent banners, set to an upbeat motivational instrumental track that was added in the edit.

There is no speech at all in it. The transcript for this file contains the single word "Music", which is the transcription engine correctly reporting that there is nothing to transcribe.

What The Footage Shows

The subject is a young man with long light-brown hair and a full beard, in a black crew-neck t-shirt with a beige cap worn backwards and a black band on one wrist. He is shown smiling broadly, shouting, raising his arms and pumping his fists.

Around him, in the shots that include the wider frame, is a crowd seated closely together facing the stage. Behind him is the white event tent, with "THE AMERICAN COMEBACK TOUR" and "PROVE ME WRONG" on the banners, sponsor logos including yrefy.com on the valance, and professional video cameras on tripods with crew visible underneath the canopy. The light is bright but slightly diffuse.

Here is the thing that has to be said plainly, because it is the whole issue with this version. What this edit shows, taken on its own, is a man celebrating at an outdoor event with a seated crowd around him — which is what people at rallies do, constantly, for entirely ordinary reasons. The automated visual analysis produced for this file read it exactly that way: as a "promotional or event highlight clip" with a "triumphant, energetic and highly positive" mood.

The context that would make the images mean something else is present in the longer version reposted by Shaun Maguire elsewhere in this section, where the surrounding crowd is visibly flat on the ground taking cover. It is not present here. This edit cuts away from the crowd and adds music, and in doing so it removes the only frames that establish when the reaction happened and what everyone else was doing at the time.

That cuts both ways, and this page will not pretend otherwise. A viewer cannot tell from these twenty-two seconds whether the man is reacting before, during or after the shot. Neither the accusation nor the defence can be established from this edit. It is the wrong version to reason from, and anyone assessing this material should go to the least-processed copy available.

What Is Not Established

No name attaches to the man on this page. The site's own treatment of this figure — Curly Hair Man in the Crowd — records that the several names circulating for him come from anonymous crowd-sourced facial matching and public-records guessing, that none has been confirmed on the record, and that being present in a crowd, or reacting to a shooting, is not evidence of involvement in any crime. That position holds here without qualification.

Reactions to a sudden loud noise in a crowd are involuntary, varied and frequently misread. People freeze, laugh, cheer, run the wrong way, and stand when they should duck. None of that is evidence of anything about what a person knew or intended, and this site does not treat it as such.

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