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Pellet Gun Man - Uncaptioned One-Minute Cut

What This Video Is​

One minute, handheld, vertical, and - like the twenty-nine-second fragment in this section - carrying no caption overlay whatsoever. Optical character recognition over sampled frames returned nothing. There is no account watermark and no source link, so the uploader is unknown.

What distinguishes this cut from the other uncaptioned copy is where it starts and where it ends. It opens on the wide establishing shot - the street, the mural, the parked cars - before the zoom, which the shorter fragment lacks. And it stays on the sidewalk bag search for the final twenty seconds rather than cutting at the vehicle. So the two uncaptioned variants complement each other: this one gives the geography and the search, the shorter one gives the arrival.

What Is Said​

One line of narration from the person filming:

I think they just found the guy right outside the [...]. Rifle on the dude's dash, and they just handcuffed him. Shit.

The transcription engine loses a word after "outside the."

The narrator is inferring, not reporting. On the afternoon of a shooting a few miles away, watching a detention from across a street, he assumes that the person being handcuffed is the person responsible. He then adds a detail - a rifle on a dashboard - that appears in none of the nine variants of this footage. According to the investigation's record, the item associated with this detention was reported as a .177 pellet break-barrel air rifle rather than a firearm.

This is worth being precise about because the narration, not the footage, is what carried this scene into the investigation. Strip the audio and this is an unremarkable street detention. Add the audio and it becomes, for anyone watching that afternoon, the capture of the assassin. Nothing changed except one bystander's guess.

What The Footage Shows​

  • 00:00 - 00:01. Wide establishing shot across a street. A white car front-right, a tree and a colourful floral mural on the left. The camera pans right and zooms toward the police activity.
  • 00:01 - 00:12. Medium-close: several officers around a man on the sidewalk beside a black police SUV with lights running. A bicycle sits in the left foreground. An officer secures handcuffs.
  • 00:12 - 00:15. Camera shake and a brief defocus as the operator reframes.
  • 00:15 - 00:26. The officers prepare to place the man in the rear of the cruiser; a female officer waits holding a brown paper bag.
  • 00:26 - 00:32. Close zoom as he is guided into the back seat.
  • 00:32 - 00:36. Pan right, centring the "provo POLICE" lettering on the SUV.
  • 00:36 - 00:40. Zoom out as the man is secured and an officer moves to a bag on the ground.
  • 00:40 - 01:00. Close on a crouching officer in blue gloves searching a green reusable bag, drawing out blue items.

The floral mural in the opening frame is the strongest geolocation handle in this footage. The investigation's notes identify a mural of that description on the side of a sandwich shop in Orem, near North State Street and 1300 North - while the vehicles in frame are marked Provo Police and other variants show a Center Street sign. Provo and Orem adjoin, and the exact corner has not been settled here.

The final twenty seconds are the clearest view in this section of what came out of the bag: the officer draws out blue items. Not weapons, not in this passage. The automated descriptions across the nine variants disagree with each other about the bag's contents - blue clothing, green tubes or canisters, and in one case handguns and magazines - which tells you the frames are not good enough to settle it.

The detained man is not named on this page and has never been publicly identified.

How It Connects​

Other Videos In This Section​

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