'Shoot Me' - The Tunnel Detention, Annotated
What This Video Is
Twenty-six seconds, published by the account Project Constitution and labelled by them "Raw Video 2 - Under The Walkway In The Tunnel." It carries a "PROTEST CONFIDENTIAL" watermark.
Structurally it is a small piece of published analysis rather than a raw capture. It opens on a Google Maps satellite still with a red dot and an arrow marking the underpass location, then runs about seven seconds of hand-held footage, then repeats the same seven seconds with hand-drawn white arrows added over specific objects. The annotations are the publisher's own, and the second pass is where their argument is.
What Is Said
The audio is short and it is the most consequential thing in the file. Two voices, overlapping:
Shoot me. Kill me. ... Kill me. Kill me.
and, from a bystander near the camera:
We don't know if it's him or not. ... What is that? ... You don't know if it's him or not.
This is a contemporaneous recording of the "shoot me" moment - the incident that put the first person into custody after the shooting and pulled responders and cameras to the underpass. According to the Utah County Sheriff's Office, the man detained shouted words to the effect of "I shot him, now shoot me" while officers were still trying to locate the shooter, and when questioned he stated that he had done it to draw attention away from the actual shooter. Utah's Department of Public Safety commissioner said publicly that he was cleared as the shooter the same day.
The second voice is the part that rarely gets quoted and deserves to be. A bystander, in real time, twice says "we don't know if it's him or not." That is a bystander applying more caution in the first minutes than a good deal of the commentary that followed applied over the next year. It is a useful corrective to hear at the top of this cluster.
The man detained here is a living person whose case has since been resolved in court on separate charges; the account of his motive above is what police and officials have said, and his own reported account is recorded on his profile page. Nothing beyond that is asserted here.
What The Footage Shows
- 00:00 - 00:02. Google Maps satellite still. Yellow text "Raw Video 2," white text "Under The Walkway In The Tunnel," a red dot and a red arrow marking the location.
- 00:03 - 00:07. Hand-held under the concrete walkway. An officer walks a handcuffed older man past a black patterned purse lying on the wet floor.
- 00:07 - 00:10. Pan right past a young man with a red and black chest bag and a man with a cane, settling on the back of a second officer.
- 00:10 - 00:25. The same seven seconds replayed with white hand-drawn arrows added, marking the detained man, the discarded purse, the young man with the chest bag, and red and green backpacks left on a ledge.
The annotations are the whole argument, and they should be read as the publisher's questions rather than as findings. Three of the four arrows point at unattended property - a purse on the ground, backpacks on a ledge - in the seconds after a shooting on a campus. Whether any of that is meaningful or is simply what a plaza looks like after several thousand people run is not something this footage settles, and the publisher does not claim it does; they point and let the viewer look.
The young man with the chest bag and the man with the cane are bystanders who happen to be in frame. They are not named here and nothing is implied about them.
The underpass location matters on its own. It places the detention away from the stage and under the walkway - geography that bears on how long responders were held at a point that was not where the shot came from.
How It Connects
- George Zinn - the full documented account, the court outcome, and his own reported denial of the payment claim.
- Distraction timeline - where this detention sits minute by minute.
- Possible distraction people - the wider roster.
- Patsies and distraction actors - how this detention is used in the multi-decoy argument.
- Beau Mason - the state official who addressed the detention publicly.
- The first police report gap - the minutes this incident falls inside.
- UVU campus police - the responding agency picture.