← AI Defense Attorney

Subpoena The AV Procurement Chain — Purchase Orders To Delivery

:::caution Legal Disclaimer Tyler Robinson is charged, not convicted, and is presumed innocent. Nothing on this page states as fact that any living person committed a crime, destroyed evidence, or acted improperly. Court filings in this case are subject to a gag order and sealing, so the public record is incomplete by design. :::

The One Thing We Would Do Differently

Serve subpoenas duces tecum on every private link in the audio-equipment chain — the event organiser, the dealer that sold the units, the freight carrier that moved them — for the paper that ties one serial-numbered transmitter to one purchase order, one delivery, and one pair of hands.

The companion instrument on this site, subpoena the microphone itself, demands the device. This page demands the paper trail behind the device, and the two are not the same request. Hardware can be lost, reused, reflashed or simply never collected. Paper survives in three or four separate organisations that have no relationship with each other and no shared reason to lose the same record on the same day.

The hinge of this entire page is the serial number. A serial number is the only field that ties a specific physical unit to a specific purchase order, a specific carton on a specific pallet, a specific delivery signature and a specific person who signed the kit out. Without it, every other document in the file is generic — a company bought some microphones once. With it, the chain is either continuous end to end, or it visibly breaks at a nameable point on a nameable date. A break is a finding. A continuous chain is also a finding, and it is the one that closes this line of inquiry cleanly.

What a break in the chain actually looks like is worth stating in advance, so that nobody reads a gap as proof of something it is not. A break is a unit on the asset register with no purchase order behind it. It is a packing list with four transmitters and a receiving log signed for three. It is a serial number that first appears in the sign-out sheet for this event and appears in no earlier one. It is a service ticket dated in the days before the event with no matching work order. It is a unit that never came back and was written off without a loss claim. Each of those has a boring explanation available to it, and the boring explanation is usually right. But each is a question the holder of the record can be made to answer under oath, which is more than any frame of video can be made to do.

This court has already been asked to reason about serial numbers, and it did so at the State's invitation. On 9 July 2026, Agent Brian Davis read into the record a Discord exchange recovered by subpoena, in which one party asks whether an item left behind "does it have a serial number," and the message attributed to the defendant answers that even if it had one "it wouldn't trace to me." The State put that exchange in front of the court because a serial number is the thing that ties an object to a person. That is precisely the logic this rider applies to the other object in this case — the one that was physically on the decedent — and on the record we hold, nobody has applied it there.

Note also how the State proved a private-party records demand works. In the same testimony, Agent Davis confirmed that law enforcement served a subpoena on Discord, a private company, and that the messages the State's central exhibits rest on were recovered through it. The instrument is not exotic and its reachability is not in doubt. The question this page raises is only which private companies were asked.

The Mic section has assembled the physical side of this argument at length: the RØDE Wireless PRO transmitter, the under-shirt routing that departed from prior practice, the charred object photographed in the transport vehicle, and the people reported to have reached across the table immediately afterwards. Every one of those threads currently rests on video analysis. Procurement records would move the same questions out of frame-by-frame argument and into an ordinary documents fight, which is the kind of fight a criminal defense wins.

What The Defense Team Did Instead

The defense in this case moved early and it uses these instruments. A Formal Request for Discovery under Utah Rule of Criminal Procedure 16, with a Rule 404(b) notice request, was filed at docket 61 on 30 September 2025 — twenty days after the killing. A Notice of Subpoena Duces Tecum was served on 1 April 2026 over the signatures of Staci Visser, Kathryn Nester, Michael Burt and Richard Novak, and the docket separately records a Notice of Subpoena Duces Tecum to the Utah County Sheriff's Department at entries 468 and 495. The instrument is in active use. On the visible record it has been pointed at the State and at law enforcement.

No subpoena to an audio-equipment vendor, dealer, freight carrier or event-production contractor appears in the material we hold. No records custodian from any such organisation appears on the State's 6 May 2026 preliminary-hearing witness list, and none testified across the five hearing days.

The State's own charging papers show how completely the equipment falls out of the government's account. The probable-cause affidavit places Charlie Kirk "holding a microphone and speaking to a crowd" and describes a second microphone "positioned directly in front of him" for questioners. Two microphones, both in the State's narrative of the moment of death. Neither is identified by make, model, owner or serial number anywhere in the charging documents, and no audio-equipment item appears among the exhibits listed in the State's 6 May 2026 Preliminary Hearing Witness and Exhibit List as we hold it, which runs from drone images of the campus through the rifle photographs, the medical examiner report and the surveillance video. In the government's theory the microphone is stage furniture, so nothing in the prosecution's case naturally goes looking for its paperwork. That is a structural feature of the record, not a criticism of anyone.

The preservation history is worth reading carefully, because the easy reading of it is wrong. The Motion to Preserve Evidence was filed at docket 75 on 8 October 2025, twenty-eight days after the killing, under Utah Code sections 77-11c-301, 77-11c-302, 77-11c-303(3) and 77-11c-401(5)(a). Judge Graf granted it on 20 October 2025 at docket 107. The State then moved to set that order aside as prematurely entered, and on 4 November 2025 a Stipulated Order set the 20 October order aside and granted the motion in part — keeping the notice-before-destructive-testing requirement, adding a fourteen-day objection window, and defining destructive testing broadly enough to include anything "likely to change the character of a piece of evidence." That definition was negotiated by the defense and it is a defense win.

What none of that history reaches is a private company. Every version of the order runs to the Utah County Attorney's Office, its agents, and the law-enforcement agencies involved — items "in their custody or under their control." A vendor's document-retention clock is not touched by any of it, and between 12 September and 20 October 2025 there was no preservation order of any kind in this case.

Why that gap matters is a question about how ordinary businesses keep records, not about anyone's conduct. Mailboxes on a thirty-, sixty- or ninety-day automatic-deletion policy quietly destroy exactly the category-17 correspondence a rider like this asks for, and they do it on a schedule nobody has to think about. Rental inventory is re-tagged and redeployed to the next booking within days. Small-parcel carriers commonly retain proof-of-delivery signature images on a rolling window measured in months, not years, before purging them. None of that is suspicious. All of it is irreversible, and none of it is stopped by an order aimed at a prosecutor's office.

There is a second structural fact, and it comes out of the warrant set rather than the exhibit list. Of the twenty-five public search warrants in this case, numbered 3212261 through 3229461, none names the Utah Valley University campus as a place to be searched — not the courtyard, not the tent area, not the Losee Center. Warrant 3212261 reaches only the deceased's body and his belongings at Timpanogos Regional Hospital. If the transmitter travelled with the body it falls inside that warrant; if it stayed in the courtyard, the public set shows no warrant authorising anyone to take it. That is a question for the crime-scene warrant gap, and it is one more reason the paper chain matters: the documents are held by private parties who need no warrant at all, only a subpoena.

That absence is a fact about the public record we hold, and it is the whole of what is asserted here. The archive holds 374 PDFs against 867 known docket entries, only 258 of which ever had a public PDF, and the filings in this case are subject to a gag order and are partly sealed.

Where This Belongs In The Case

Stage of the case	When that stage runs	Status of this step
Litigation hold letters to private parties	Available immediately; no court order needed	Not visible on the public record
Third-party subpoena duces tecum (Utah R. Crim. P. 14)	From arraignment onward	Not visible on the public record
Preliminary hearing — July 6-10, 2026	Completed	No records custodian called; not found in the certified transcripts we hold
Trial subpoenas and Rule 902(11) notice	After bind-over; argued 1 September 2026	Not yet due — and a step not yet due has not been missed

Witness Or Discovery Target

How it would be done	Target	Took the stand?	Status on the public record
Subpoena duces tecum — private party	Records custodian, event organiser / production entity that owned or hired the audio kit	No	No public subpoena
Subpoena duces tecum — private party	Records custodian, the audio dealer or distributor that sold or rented the units	No	No public subpoena
Subpoena duces tecum — private party	Records custodian, the freight carrier that delivered them	No	No public subpoena
GRAMA request — public body, no court order	Utah Valley University event services: facility-use agreement, technical rider, load-in schedule	n/a	Route proven to work here; see UVU GRAMA records
Cross-examination — witness testified	Sgt. Jennifer Faumuina, crime-scene sergeant	Yes — 9 July 2026	Testified the courtyard was processed by the FBI; the certified transcript does not show any audio-equipment item being inventoried
Cross-examination — witness testified	Agent Brian Davis	Yes — 9 July 2026	Testified a subpoena was served on Discord and produced the messages; no equipment-vendor subpoena appears in the transcript we hold
Witness never called publicly	AV crew members named in public reporting, including Phillip Goldsberry Jr., Michael Olbert and Terryl Farnsworth	No	Not on any public witness list

The rider — what the subpoena actually commands

This is the attachment, not a description of one. Each numbered category is written to be served verbatim on a private records custodian, with the definition block that makes it enforceable.

Definitions. "The Equipment" means every wireless microphone transmitter, receiver, lavalier capsule, windscreen, clip, magnetic mount, battery, charger, antenna and in-ear monitor present at, delivered to, or intended for the event held in the Fountain Courtyard at Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah, on 10 September 2025. "Document" includes electronic records, database entries, spreadsheets, scanned images, email, text and chat messages, and metadata.

1. Every purchase order issued for The Equipment, showing PO number, date, requisitioner, approver, line items and quantities.
2. Every quotation, proposal or rate sheet received before that purchase order, and any competing quotation not accepted.
3. Every sales invoice, rental agreement, credit memo and statement covering The Equipment, showing unit price, tax, terms and the account billed.
4. The funding source for that expenditure: the general-ledger account, cost centre, project code, budget line, grant, sponsorship or reimbursement against which it was charged, and any document showing a third party paid or reimbursed any part of it.
5. Any contract vehicle under which The Equipment was acquired — master service agreement, preferred-vendor agreement, standing rental contract, blanket PO or framework — including its term and its amendments.
6. Every packing list, pick ticket, carton manifest and pallet manifest for the shipment or shipments containing The Equipment.
7. Every bill of lading, air waybill, courier label and tracking record for those shipments, including origin, destination, ship date, weight and service level.
8. Every proof of delivery: the delivery signature or signature image, the printed name, the date and time stamp, the geolocation stamp where captured, and any photograph the carrier took at the point of delivery.
9. Every receiving log entry made when The Equipment was booked in — receiver's name, date, condition noted, discrepancies noted, and any short-shipment or damage claim.
10. The serial number of every unit received, and every document in which those serial numbers appear: the invoice, the packing list, the asset register, the insurance schedule, the service ticket, the sign-out sheet.
11. The asset tag or internal inventory identifier assigned to each unit, the date it was assigned, the person who assigned it, and every subsequent re-tagging.
12. The asset register or inventory system extract for the audio kit, exported for the period 1 January 2025 to date, including every add, move, transfer, retire and write-off record.
13. Every sign-out, check-out, road-case manifest or kit list showing which serial-numbered units travelled to which events, for every event from 1 January 2025 to 10 September 2025 inclusive.
14. Every service, repair, warranty, RMA, replacement or firmware record for those units, including the firmware revision installed, the date it was installed, and the technician or vendor who installed it.
15. Every insurance rider, scheduled-equipment endorsement, certificate of insurance and loss claim naming The Equipment or its serial numbers.
16. Every document recording the physical location and custodian of each unit from the moment it was received until the present, including any unit reported lost, damaged, destroyed, retired, sold, traded in or not returned after 10 September 2025.
17. Every communication — email, text, chat, voicemail transcript or ticket — concerning the specification, ordering, substitution, delivery, configuration, servicing, placement or post-event disposition of The Equipment, for the period 1 July 2025 to 31 October 2025.
18. Every document recording any delivery, collection, swap, service call or equipment movement between 8 and 10 September 2025 inclusive, whoever performed it.
19. Every payment record for the acquisition: the card authorisation and statement line, cheque, ACH remittance advice, wire confirmation or expense-report reimbursement, together with the name on the account that paid.
20. Every customs and import document for units manufactured outside the United States — commercial invoice, entry summary, importer of record, country of origin and date of entry — for the shipments containing The Equipment.
21. Every document-retention schedule and litigation-hold notice in force at your organisation between 10 September 2025 and today, and any record of automatic deletion applied to categories 1 to 20.
22. A certification of records custodian conforming to Utah Rule of Evidence 902(11), executed by the person with knowledge of how the records above are made and kept.

Authentication is category 22, and it is not an afterthought

Category 20 is on the list because it is the one document class that reaches across the border. A Utah subpoena cannot command an Australian manufacturer to do anything, but the importer of record named on a US customs entry is a US party, and that party is reachable. It is the last rung of the ladder that a state court can still put its hand on.

A box of documents that nobody can authenticate is a box of documents that never reaches a jury. Utah Rule of Evidence 902(11) makes a certified record of a regularly conducted activity self-authenticating: the custodian signs a certification that the record was made at or near the time by someone with knowledge, was kept in the ordinary course, and was made as a regular practice. That certification plus Rule 803(6) puts the invoice into evidence without flying anybody to Provo. It carries a condition worth diarising — the proponent must give the other side reasonable written notice and make the records and the certification available for inspection in advance.

Asking for the certification in the rider itself, rather than discovering six months later that you need it, is the difference between a document and an exhibit.

The Questions That Were Not Asked

Addressed to witnesses who took the stand on 9 July 2026, and to a custodian who has not been called.

1. Sergeant Faumuina, you told this court that the courtyard area was processed by the FBI. Did you personally observe what was collected from that courtyard?
2. Does the evidence inventory you signed contain a single line item for a microphone, a transmitter, a receiver, a battery, a cable or any other piece of audio equipment?
3. Was any audio equipment photographed in place in the courtyard before it was moved, in the way the cartridges and the rifle were photographed in place?
4. If a piece of equipment was collected by the FBI rather than by your team, would it appear anywhere in your agency's evidence system at all?
5. Agent Davis, the exchange you read to this court asks whether an item has a serial number and whether it would trace back to a person. Did anyone in this investigation ask that same question about the wireless transmitter that was on Mr. Kirk's body?
6. Agent Davis, you testified that law enforcement served a subpoena on Discord and that the messages came back through that subpoena. Was any subpoena served on the company that supplied the audio equipment used at that event?
7. Was any subpoena served on any freight carrier for delivery records into Orem, Utah in the week before September 10, 2025?
8. Who at your agency decided which private companies would receive a records subpoena in this investigation?
9. To the records custodian: does your organisation record the serial number of each wireless transmitter it owns or rents, and in which system is that recorded?
10. Can you match the serial number of a unit on your asset register to the purchase order it arrived on and to the delivery signature that received it?
11. What is your organisation's automatic email-deletion interval, and did anyone instruct you to suspend it after September 10, 2025?
12. Between September 8 and September 10, 2025, does any record in your system show an equipment delivery, collection, swap or service call?
13. Is every unit that went out to that event accounted for on your inventory today, and if any unit is not, what does the record say happened to it?

Why A Defense Attorney Would Want This

Because it is the cheapest evidence in the case and nobody has to consent to it. A subpoena duces tecum to a private company under Utah Rule of Criminal Procedure 14 raises no sovereign immunity, no classification, no state-secrets privilege and no interagency negotiation. A judge who would never order a federal agency to answer anything will sign a records subpoena to an equipment dealer without a hearing. Courts grant these routinely.

It is also the half of the device question that gets stronger with time rather than weaker. Physical evidence degrades and gets reused; accounting records get archived and audited. A dealer's sales invoice from 2025 is very likely still retrievable, because tax record-retention practice keeps sales documentation for years. That makes the dealer end of the chain the most durable link in it, and it is the link nobody has pulled.

And it is falsifiable in the defense's own face, which is why it is worth doing. If the paper shows an ordinary consumer-channel purchase from an ordinary retailer, delivered by an ordinary carrier to an ordinary receiving dock, with every serial number still on the asset register today, then a large part of the argument on this site about that device is answered and the defense should spend its budget elsewhere. An instrument that can only ever confirm what you already believed is not an instrument.

There is one more reason, and it does not depend on any document arriving. This instrument feeds the reasonable-doubt route that needs no alternative perpetrator at all: the argument that the jury is being asked to convict on the output of a process it cannot inspect. If the answer to "who bought the device that was on his body, and where is it now" is that nobody in this investigation ever asked, that is a fact about the investigation, and it is a fact a juror can hold without believing any theory about who else might have been involved. A refusal is also an answer. So is a document-retention schedule showing that the records were deleted on a timetable while a preservation order sat over the State side of the case and over nobody else.

Reachable, and unreachable — keep these apart

REACHABLE — ordinary subpoenas to private parties, plus one public-records route. Purchase orders, quotations, invoices, contract vehicles, funding source, shipping and delivery records, receiving logs, serial-number assignment, asset registers, service and firmware history, insurance schedules, retention schedules, and the Rule 902(11) custodian certification. These go to the event organiser or production entity, the dealer or distributor, the freight carrier, and any rental house. None of them is a government agency. None of them has to waive anything. Separately, Utah Valley University is a public body, so its facility-use agreement, technical rider and load-in schedule for that booking are reachable under Utah's Government Records Access and Management Act, Utah Code section 63G-2-204, which requires a response within ten business days and costs a records fee rather than a motion. That route is not theoretical here: a GRAMA request by a news organisation already returned roughly 50 documents and 112 pages from this university about this event, as catalogued on the UVU GRAMA records page.

UNREACHABLE at this stage — anything requiring a government agency to disclose a contracting relationship. If the argument is that a component of the device traces to a defense-contracting pipeline of the kind described on the DoD contract and Accurate Energetic Systems pages, then the demand stops being a records subpoena to a private vendor and becomes a demand that an agency produce award files, end-user identification, delivery destinations and contracting-officer records. That is a different animal. It attracts a motion to quash, a classification objection, and very likely a refusal — and a refusal on the record, while itself informative, is not a document.

Nothing in the paragraph above is served before the gateway. The instrument that has to come first is the alternative-perpetrator notice. Until a third-party defense is actually before this court, supported by a proffer, a demand aimed at a government contracting file is irrelevant to any issue in the case and gets quashed in a paragraph. The private-party half of this rider needs no such notice — it goes to the origin and custody of an object that was physically on the decedent, which is relevant on any theory. The two halves are served in that order, and never in the reverse order.

Where this touches September 9, 2025, it does so as a documents demand and nothing more: category 18 asks for every record of an equipment movement between 8 and 10 September, whoever performed it. This page names no attendee of any meeting on that date, and the related instrument, Fort Huachuca records, is written to the same rule.

Day-one date: our attorney sends the litigation-hold letters on 15 September 2025 and serves the first subpoenas duces tecum the moment the case is filed and a subpoena can issue. On that date the equipment was five days off the stage, the road cases had not been fully broken down and redeployed, ninety-day mailbox auto-deletion had not yet reached the pre-event ordering emails, carrier proof-of-delivery images from early September were still live in the carrier's system, and any unit that went out to that event was still either in inventory or freshly missing from it. The first preservation order in this case does not arrive until 20 October 2025, thirty-five days later, is set aside on 4 November and re-entered in part by stipulation — and in every version it reaches only the Utah County Attorney's Office, its agents and law enforcement. It never touched a private vendor's delete schedule. That is the window this instrument exists to catch, and every month since has narrowed it.

The Honest Counterargument

The strongest answer is procedural and this case already supplies it. On 22 June 2026, when the defense sought to compel the live attendance of an out-of-state witness under Utah Code section 77-21-3, Judge Graf denied the application and granted the State's motion to quash, reasoning that a preliminary hearing tests probable cause and that the defense had to identify specific testimony reasonably likely to negate it. A records subpoena aimed at an equipment vendor would have met the same gate at the same stage. The denial was expressly without prejudice and subject to renewal, and the natural moment for this rider is after bind-over, in the trial phase — not before it. On that reading, the absence of this subpoena from the pre-hearing record is correct sequencing rather than an omission.

The second answer is jurisdictional and it is real. RØDE is an Australian manufacturer. A Utah criminal subpoena does not reach an Australian company, and an out-of-state records custodian is reached, if at all, through the courts of the state where the custodian sits. The top of this chain may simply be outside the reach of any process this court can issue, and a rider that looks comprehensive on paper may in practice only ever reach the bottom two links.

The third is the one a defense attorney feels in the stomach. The most likely single outcome of all twenty-two categories is a perfectly ordinary paper trail — a retailer, a card payment, a courier, a receiving signature, a kit list — and a serial number that matches a unit still sitting in inventory today. Serving this rider also signals the theory. It tells the State exactly where the defense is going and invites it to arrive first with an audio expert who says the recording is consistent with a rifle report. Some capital lawyers would rather hold an alternative-mechanism theory in reserve until the State has committed to its own, and there is nothing careless about that judgment.

The fourth is timing, and it cuts against us. Every month that passes makes categories 8, 17 and 18 less likely to survive. A rider served in the trial phase, properly sequenced and correctly grounded, may arrive at three organisations that have each already, lawfully and automatically, deleted the very correspondence and delivery images that would have made the chain continuous. Being right about the instrument and late with it produces the same empty envelope as being wrong about it. That is the honest cost of the sequencing answer above, and both things can be true at once.

Sources On This Site

• Mic — Exploding Mic Theory
• RØDE Wireless PRO — The Microphone on Kirk's Shirt
• AV Team and Mic Setup
• Goldsberry Holding The Mic
• Table Jumpers and the Device Grab
• Burnt Object — RØDE Transmitter Claim
• The DoD Contract
• Accurate Energetic Systems
• UVU GRAMA Records
• Subpoena The Microphone Itself
• Alternative-Perpetrator Notice — the gateway
• TPUSA Organizational Subpoenas
• Independent Device Re-Examination
• Scene Alteration and Spoliation
• Fort Huachuca Records
• The Day-One Track
• Crime-Scene Warrant Gap
• University Property Records Subpoena
• Case Stage Map

---

:::danger Theoretical Exercise Only This page is a theoretical exercise. It is a written simulation of how an idealised defense attorney might approach this case. We make no claim that there is any problem with the current defense attorney, with any member of the defense team, or with any decision they have made.

Real capital defense is conducted under a gag order, with sealed filings, and on the basis of full discovery that the public has never seen. Counsel of record know facts we do not. A step described here as "not on the public record" may already have been taken privately, may have been considered and rejected for good reason, or may not yet be due at this stage of the case. Silence in the public record is not evidence of a failure.

Nothing here is legal advice, a criticism of any licensed attorney, or an allegation of professional misconduct. :::

This website's author is @HolonCitizen on X and YouTube/@HolonCitizen. Follow me there.