Tate Helmuth Walks Through the Crowd Footage
What This Video Is
A one minute forty second screen recording, posted to X by Tate Helmuth and addressed to the account @BlakeBednarz, saved into the investigation archive under post ID 1981181402381975552. It is a citizen-analysis clip in the most literal sense: a video player on a desktop, a cursor, and a narrator scrubbing back and forth through somebody else's crowd footage from Utah Valley University while she talks over it. She is not showing new footage. She is showing where in existing footage she thinks people should look.
What Is Said
Helmuth narrates continuously and flags four things. She is unusually explicit about the limits of her own reading, and that hedging is part of the record.
She opens by setting the moment: "Charlie is still on the ground with people around him, and I'm just going to drag through the video to get through to some of the interesting spots."
The camera operator on the rise. At about 0:15 she points to a man who, she says, "came straight out and up here, jumped up here and started recording video. We've never seen his video, though, have we? Very interesting." Her claim here is narrow and checkable: a bystander filmed from an elevated position and that recording is not among the material the public has seen.
Mikey McCoy. At roughly 0:25 she identifies a man in the background near parked vehicles as Mikey McCoy and remarks on his manner rather than any act: "he was calm as a cucumber. He wasn't running or anything." She adds that the direction he walks is toward where vehicles were parked, and refers to Frank Turek having said that McCoy ended up at the hospital. She states no wrongdoing, and neither does this page.
The man in the brown shirt. At about 0:45 she describes a bearded man in a brown shirt who, she says, had been at the table moments earlier and then "ran all the way out here." She wonders aloud whether it was vehicle-related: "He does have something in his hand that looks like a car key or something. Don't know what that is."
The object and the woman pointing. From roughly 0:58 she reaches the segment the clip is really about. She says she "always thought that the tan shirted guy gave him the palm gun" because "it looks like he has it and he's putting it in his pocket." She then argues against herself in the next breath: "It's not really round. Don't know what that is." She also says a woman in a black and white shirt is pointing at the man and shouting that he has a gun, and that the woman then goes looking for a police officer — "but I never see her again."
Every one of those is Helmuth's reading of low-resolution frames, offered as a question. She names no crime and reaches no conclusion, and the investigation has not confirmed any of the four items. They are logged here as claims made on camera by a named person, which is what they are.
What The Footage Shows
The screen recording itself shows a desktop video player being scrubbed, with a yellow highlight cursor as the only graphic. The underlying footage is a hand-held walk-and-film through the aftermath: the branded canopy and grass, a move under a concrete overhang, a man climbing a gravel pile beside a concrete wall to film from height, a black SUV with people running past it, a paved lot with golf carts, a bearded man in a brown shirt jogging toward the camera holding keys, a man in a plaid shirt putting a small object into his pocket while a woman in blue points and shouts, and finally someone in a dark shirt being walked away toward parked vehicles.
The gap between the narration and the frames is the point. The narration names people and assigns intent; the frames show distant figures at consumer resolution, several of them for two or three frames only — Helmuth says so herself about one of them. Nothing in the imagery identifies anyone. The identifications are hers, made from familiarity with other footage.
One detail is worth suppressing rather than repeating: the automated pass logged a partial vehicle plate from this clip, flagged as uncertain. It is not reproduced here.
How It Connects
- Mikey McCoy — the person named at about 0:25, and what the investigation does and does not establish about his movements.
- McCoy calls his wife — the timed call in the same window that this clip's second segment overlaps.
- The hand-device question at UVU — the object claim in the final forty seconds, set out with its counterarguments.
- Rick Cutler — the person named in that dispute elsewhere in the investigation.
- Blake Bednarz — the account this clip is addressed to, and his role in the footage-forensics thread.
- UVU HD footage withheld — directly relevant to her first point, that a bystander's recording from the rise has never surfaced.