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Walking The Route: Doorbell Cameras To Three Wooded Areas

What This Video Is​

Six minutes and fifty-six seconds of first-person walking video published by Project Constitution with post identifier 2001569932966760448. The narrator is never seen. He walks the route himself, camera forward, and overlays the corresponding surveillance and news footage in the corner of the frame as he reaches each point — doorbell-camera video, a TMZ-watermarked residential security clip, still images released by investigators, and an ABC 4 Utah news segment. It has not been published to IPFS, so a still frame stands in for the player.

Of everything in this section, this is the piece with the most original legwork in it. The narrator physically went to each location, filmed it, and matched it to published footage. That is real work and it produces something no desk analysis can: a continuous sense of the distances, gradients, stairs and sightlines involved.

A necessary caution about language. The narrator refers to the person in the footage in strongly condemnatory terms — "callous monster," "heartless criminal," "cold-blooded assassin." Those are his words and they are not adopted here. The man charged in this case has not been tried, is entitled to the presumption of innocence, and the identification of the figure in this surveillance footage as that man is itself contested elsewhere on this site. This page uses "the figure" and "the suspect" and takes no position on identity.

What Is Said​

The narration is continuous and methodical. The route it describes:

A car parked in a residential area north of campus. The first footage of a figure walking, from a doorbell camera — the narrator says a friend's brother captured it. West along a residential street, then a left turn onto a dead-end road that is a dead end for vehicles but not for pedestrians. A residential security camera, the one carrying the TMZ watermark, catching the figure walking south and crossing at an angle.

That crossing is where the narrator makes his first substantive observation: "This gives us a view of his limp. It is assumed that he is limping because he has a rifle in his pants." He flags the assumption as an assumption, which is more care than this kind of video usually shows.

Then across a grassy area into a parking lot, through a pedestrian tunnel — where the narrator stops and points out the physical camera that produced the widely circulated close image — up a stairway that yields a second and third image, and out at ground level with a view of the building in question.

He then reasons about the choice of approach: that the figure did not walk in front of the building because of the crowd assembling to watch, and instead went along the north side, between that building and the Institute of Religion. He adds, dryly, "If he still has that rifle in his pants, these many stairs and hills will not be easy for him."

The access to the roof is the part he is most struck by. He describes a door, an outdoor stairway to a rooftop pedestrian walkway that was closed, an alternative way up, and then a railing that is simply stepped over: "It's shocking how accessible this roof is, just minutes before the event begins." From the position he reaches, he estimates the distance to the event at approximately two hundred yards to the west, and describes the sightline as clear and unobstructed. He places the shot at 12:23 p.m.

The exit: a run across the rooftop, behind windows, to the opposite corner. Here he offers a small physical observation about the released climb-down footage — a mark on a black panel that he thinks may be from the figure's left shoe — and immediately withdraws the certainty: "But I cannot confirm that." He notes the ground impressions and the official statement that they are consistent with the type of shoe involved, and again hedges: "I imagine a couple of those were left by the suspect."

The last third is the rifle question, and it is the most careful section. He identifies three candidate wooded areas and does not pick one. Wooded area one, entered directly off the escape route, with a steep hill and orange cones and a news crew's earlier footage showing police tape since removed: "Could this be the location the rifle was left behind, wrapped in a towel? Possibly, but I'm not convinced." Wooded area two, behind a house near the ROTC building, where a local resident reportedly told a friend of his the rifle was found: "Is this true? I think it's very possible. But we've got one more place to look." Wooded area three, furthest from campus and reachable from two roads, "which would make retrieval more easy later on."

And the observation he clearly regards as his strongest, which uses the same residential camera twice:

That same camera that captured the limping suspect on his way to campus also captured the suspect going away from campus, but this time, there's no limp.

He adds that the figure spends longer behind one house than the route requires, and suggests that could support the weapon having been left there, or a change of clothes.

What The Footage Shows​

Continuous handheld walking video, in daylight, with overlays. Sidewalks, a white picket fence, a brick wall, a gravel clearing with a horse trailer, campus parking structures, a fluorescent-lit pedestrian tunnel, a dome camera on the tunnel ceiling, concrete stairways, lawns, a small bridge over a ditch, roof access, and three patches of trees. Graphics label "WOODED AREA 1," "WOODED AREA 2," "WOODED AREA 3." Orange cones, remnants of police tape, "NO TRESPASSING" and "STAY OUT" signage, and a forensic measuring tape appear at various points. The inserted footage carries TMZ and ABC 4 Utah marks.

Only two people are visible in the whole piece: the figure in the borrowed surveillance footage, and a news reporter in the inserted broadcast clip, standing in a wooded area pointing at a retaining wall.

The strength and the weakness of the piece are the same thing. Walking it establishes the geography beyond argument — those stairs exist, that railing is that low, that distance is that far, those three wooded areas are where he says they are. What walking it cannot establish is that the figure in the borrowed footage took this route, or who that figure is. The overlays assert the correspondence; the narrator's own hedges ("I believe," "I imagine," "I cannot confirm") are the honest measure of how much of the route is reconstruction rather than record.

How It Connects​

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