Skip to main content
← AI Defense Attorney

Subpoena The Dispatch And CAD Record — Who Directed The First Hours

:::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. :::

:::note This page names nobody who was chased Archived radio traffic from the afternoon of September 10, 2025 carries look-outs for two private individuals. Neither has been charged with anything in this case. They are not named here, not described, and nothing about their state of mind is asserted or implied. This page is about DECISIONS AND TIMING inside a dispatch system — who directed effort, at what minute, on whose authority. It is not about them, and the demand below asks for records, never for persons. :::

The One Thing We Would Do Differently​

Serve a Rule 14 subpoena duces tecum on the dispatch authority of record for Utah County and on UVU Police for the complete, unredacted CAD incident record, the radio recordings and radio log, the look-out issuance record, and the licence-plate-reader query log for September 10-11, 2025 — with the custodian certification that makes them self-authenticating.

A computer-aided dispatch record is not a witness statement. It is a database. Every unit status change, every comment line, every query is written to it automatically, with a machine timestamp, by software that has no theory of the case. Nobody drafted it for a courtroom. Nobody can soften it eleven months later. It is the closest thing a criminal trial ever gets to an unbiased narrator of what an agency was actually doing minute by minute.

That matters here for one reason. The State's account of September 10, 2025 runs from the courtyard to the Losee Center roof to a wooded area to a surrender in Washington County. The archived radio traffic circulating publicly describes something else running in parallel for hours: a vehicle hunt built on a report that a hospital later told officers had not happened, a described vehicle that changed colour and make repeatedly, a plate that returned no record at all, and surveillance of a residential address where the unmarked vehicles that arrived turned out to be federal. Those recordings reach the public only as clips narrated by citizen researchers. They are not the record. The record is the CAD database, and it has never been produced to anybody outside the case.

Whatever it shows, it shows objectively. If the first hours were an ordinary multi-agency scramble that triaged bad tips efficiently, the CAD says so and this line of inquiry dies cheaply. If the first hours of a capital investigation went somewhere the State has not accounted for on any document the defense can inspect, the CAD says that too — in timestamps, not adjectives.

Schedule A — the rider we would serve​

Directed to the custodian of records for the dispatch authority of record for Utah County, and separately to Utah Valley University Police, Orem City Police, Provo City Police and the Utah County Sheriff's Office. For the period 00:00 MDT September 10, 2025 through 23:59 MDT September 11, 2025, produce:

  1. The complete CAD incident record for every incident number generated in connection with the Utah Valley University shooting, unredacted, exported in the system's native format with all fields present — including every unit status change (dispatched, en route, on scene, cleared) with its machine timestamp to the second, every free-text comment line with the terminal identifier and operator identifier that entered it, and the audit or edit history of the record showing any entry created, modified, appended or deleted after initial entry, with the time and identifier of each change.
  2. All radio recordings and the radio log for every talkgroup carrying traffic in the operational period, including any talkgroup that was encrypted or restricted, together with the channel plan or talkgroup map in force that day.
  3. The interoperability and patch log: which talkgroups were patched to which, at what time, and which outside agencies — including federal personnel — were placed onto a local talkgroup and by whose authorisation.
  4. All 911 and non-emergency call recordings, the call-taker screen notes, and the ANI/ALI records for every call relating to the incident.
  5. The look-out issuance record (BOLO, ATL or equivalent): the exact text broadcast, the time of each broadcast, the originating agency, the identifier of the person who authorised it, and every amendment, correction and cancellation with its time.
  6. The licence-plate-reader and Flock query log: every query run in connection with this incident, the identifier of the officer who ran it, the time, the plate string or vehicle description searched, every hit or non-hit returned, the retention and purge settings in force on September 10, 2025, and any litigation hold, evidence hold or extended-retention flag applied to that data and the date it was applied.
  7. The record of who directed effort toward each described vehicle: the transmission or entry that started it, the requesting agency or individual by role, the basis stated at the time, and the transmission or entry that ended it.
  8. The mutual-aid and task-force activation record: which agencies were requested or self-deployed, the time each request was made, and the time each agency's first unit reported on scene.
  9. The arrival-order record for every address units were directed to on September 10 and 11, 2025: unit arrival timestamps, and any entry recording personnel already present when the first local unit arrived.
  10. The records-retention schedule applicable to each item above, and all documentation of any litigation hold, preservation letter or court order applied to it, with dates.
  11. The detention and release paperwork for any person taken into custody or detained on those dates, which is the subject of the companion instrument and is not duplicated here — see Detention And Release Records.
  12. A custodian certification under Utah R. Evid. 902(11), 902(13) and 902(14) sufficient to authenticate items 1 through 9 as records of a regularly conducted activity generated by an electronic process, so the material can be admitted without a live custodian at trial.

What The Defense Team Did Instead​

This category was requested, early, and in writing. The Formal Request for Discovery filed September 30, 2025 under Utah R. Crim. P. 16 contains, at specific request 10, a demand for "copies of all recordings and/or transcripts of any communications, including dispatch calls from law enforcement, fire department or any other civilian agency pertaining to the above-entitled case." Request 1 asks for "all 911 audio recordings and unofficial transcripts." Request 8 asks for all field interview cards. Request 11 asks the State to specify the date, time and substance of every further contact between an investigating officer and any witness. That is a serious, correctly framed early demand and it is on the public docket.

Preservation was pressed too. The Motion to Preserve Evidence of October 8, 2025 asked the court to order the Utah County Attorney's Office and every law enforcement agency involved to preserve all evidence in their custody or control. The court granted it on October 20, 2025, the State moved to set that order aside as prematurely entered, and on November 4, 2025 Judge Graf entered a stipulated order setting aside the first order and granting the motion in part — the State and its agents must preserve all material evidence, with a notice-and-fourteen-days mechanism for releasing anything the State considers immaterial.

What the archive we hold does not contain is the other end of that exchange. No filed response identifies what was produced against request 10 or what was withheld and why, although the September 30 request expressly asked for one. No CAD export, radio log, look-out issuance record or licence-plate-reader return appears among the State's 34 preliminary-hearing exhibits on the May 6, 2026 Witness and Exhibit List, and none of the six witnesses on that list is a communications-centre or dispatch witness. A Notice of Subpoena Duces Tecum to the Utah County Sheriff's Department exists at docket entries 468 and 495; neither the notice nor any return is held here, so its subject matter is unknown to us.

How that was checked matters, so here it is plainly. We hold Moorhead certified transcripts for two hearing days only: Day 4 at 278 pages and Day 5 at 97 pages. Both were searched in full, term by term, together with the word index each transcript carries at the back. The word index is the useful control — it counts every occurrence of every word in the volume, so a term that returns nothing in the body and nothing in the index is genuinely absent from that day rather than missed by a bad search string.

And in the two certified transcripts we hold — preliminary hearing Day 4 (July 9, 2026) and Day 5 (July 10, 2026) — the words dispatch, CAD, scanner, police radio, BOLO, lookout, Flock and licence plate reader do not appear in any question or answer. The single occurrence of "radio" in Day 4 is a witness describing what a person talked about, not a police channel. That is a statement about our two certified transcripts and nothing more. Days 1, 2 and 3 exist here only as machine transcriptions of the pool feed and are not the record. The filings are under a gag order and are partly sealed, so the public docket is incomplete by design.

Where This Belongs In The Case​

Stage of the caseWhen that stage runsStatus of this step
Rule 16 discovery demandServed September 30, 2025 — answered on a schedule we cannot seeDispatch and 911 categories expressly requested; no filed production response held
Third-party records subpoena, Utah R. Crim. P. 14From arraignment onward; must be filed no later than 28 days before trialNot visible on the public record for any dispatch authority
Preliminary hearing crossJuly 6-10, 2026 — completedNo dispatch, CAD, radio, look-out or plate-reader line appears in the certified Day 4 or Day 5 transcripts
Trial — defense case and Rule 1006 summariesNo trial date set; bind-over argued September 1, 2026Still fully open

Witness Or Discovery Target​

How it would be doneTargetTook the stand?Status on the public record
Rule 14 subpoena duces tecumCustodian of records, dispatch authority of record for Utah Countyn/aDocket 468/495 shows a Notice of Subpoena Duces Tecum to the Utah County Sheriff's Department; neither notice nor return is held here
Rule 16 demand — already servedUtah County Attorney's Officen/aRequested 9-30-2025 at items 1, 10 and 11; no filed response identifying production or withholding is held
Cross-examination — witness testifiedJennifer Faumuina, SBI sergeantYes — July 7 and July 9, 2026Crossed at length on the crime scenes, the 229-page SBI report and lab routing; no dispatch, CAD or plate-reader question appears in the certified Day 4 transcript
Cross-examination — witness testifiedAgent Brian Davis, SBIYes — July 8 and July 9, 2026The certified Day 4 transcript records defense counsel stating there would be no cross-examination of this witness that day
Rule 14 subpoena duces tecumThe licence-plate-reader system operator holding the September 2025 query logn/aNot visible on the public record
Witness never called publiclyThe communications-centre shift supervisor on duty September 10, 2025NoNo communications-centre witness appears on the State's May 6, 2026 witness list
Records demandMutual-aid and task-force activation records across the 40 law enforcement or other government agencies the defense reported identified as of August 28, 2026n/aThe agency count is on the record; the activation records are not

The Questions That Were Not Asked​

Addressed to Sergeant Jennifer Faumuina, who agreed on cross-examination on July 9, 2026 that her role was "the traffic manager of the whole operation," that multiple agencies beyond SBI were involved, and that her agency produced a 229-page report of which she authored nine sections.

  1. Sergeant, the operation you managed has a computer-aided dispatch incident number. What is it?
  2. Does that CAD record still exist today, and has anyone placed a hold on it?
  3. Of the nine reports you wrote, does any one of them reconstruct where units were between 12:26 p.m. and midnight on September 10?
  4. Within those 229 pages, is there a section that accounts for the vehicle look-outs broadcast that afternoon?
  5. Who has authority to put a vehicle look-out on the air, and is the authorising officer recorded in the system when they do?
  6. When an officer runs a plate or a vehicle description through a licence-plate-reader system, does that leave a query record showing who ran it and when?
  7. Was a litigation hold or an extended-retention flag ever placed on the licence-plate-reader data for September 10, 2025?
  8. Were federal personnel patched onto a local talkgroup that day, and would that patch appear in the radio log?
  9. When you and FBI evidence response team lead Special Agent Michelle Cammack recovered the towel, how did the two of you come to be at that location — and is that reflected in the CAD?
  10. Does the record show the time each outside agency's first unit reported on scene?
  11. At any address local units were directed to on September 10 or 11, does the record note who was already present when the first local unit arrived?
  12. Does anything in the 229 pages record a decision to stop directing effort toward one described vehicle and start directing it toward another, and who made it?

Addressed to the records custodian under the subpoena:

  1. Does your CAD system retain an audit trail of entries modified or deleted after creation, and can you export it?
  2. What is the retention schedule for the radio recordings from September 10, 2025, and what is the disposal date under it?
  3. Has any recording or record within the scope of this subpoena already been purged, and if so, on what date and under what authority?
  4. Are the CAD comment lines stored with the terminal and operator identifier of whoever typed them, and can that field be exported?
  5. Is there a separate log for queries run against state or federal databases from a dispatch terminal that day?
  6. When an outside agency is patched onto a local talkgroup, does your system record the patch, the requesting agency and the time?

Why A Defense Attorney Would Want This​

This instrument serves Doctrine 3, Route 2 — the investigation itself. It needs no alternative perpetrator and it proves nothing about who was on the roof. It asks a narrower and much harder question: can the State account for what its own investigation was doing during the hours it says it was building the case now before the court? A jury that cannot inspect the process is being asked to trust its output, and a capital verdict is a poor place to start trusting.

It is also the cheapest instrument on this site. It does not touch a classified holding. It does not require a federal agency to waive anything. It asks a county dispatch centre for a database export, an audio file and a query log — records that agency generates by default and produces routinely in ordinary criminal cases. Judges grant these. They are also self-authenticating once certified under Utah R. Evid. 902(11), 902(13) and 902(14), which means the defense can put the timeline in front of a jury as a Rule 1006 summary without depending on a State witness to narrate it.

There is a witness-control reason as well, and it is the reason a defense attorney reaches for a database before reaching for a person. Almost everything the State has offered about the first hours arrives through officers summarising a 229-page compiled report that many hands wrote. A witness reading out another author's paragraph has no personal knowledge of the event in it — that is a Rule 602 problem and a hearsay-conduit problem, and it is the structural weakness running through this whole case. The CAD export is the document underneath those paragraphs. Holding it converts every "as I recall" into a checkable claim, and it makes impeachment by omission possible: if a decision described from the stand left no trace in a system that logs everything automatically, that gap is a fair question, and it can only be asked by someone who has the export in hand.

And a refusal is an answer. If the dispatch authority responds that the material is exempt, or the State opposes production, or the return comes back with the audit trail withheld, that resistance is on the docket, in writing, in a case where the government's own account depends on the jury believing the investigation was orderly.

Day-one date: our attorney would have served this on September 15, 2025 — the first business day after the initial appearance and inside every relevant retention window. The perishability here is severe and it is documented. Flock Safety's default automatic-purge setting for licence-plate-reader reads was 30 days at the time, so absent a preservation hold the September 10, 2025 reads and the query log around them reached their ordinary deletion date in roughly the second week of October 2025 — before the first preservation order in this case was entered on October 20, and about a month before the November 4 stipulated order that replaced it. Dispatch audio is on a longer but finite clock: the Utah State Archives general schedule for officer and dispatch recordings, and the county-level series written against it, set retention for dispatch audio computer data files at one year, then delete. On that schedule the September 10, 2025 recordings reach their ordinary disposal date this month. A demand served in September 2025 catches every byte of this. A demand served today catches whatever a hold, a case flag or an agency's own good sense happened to spare.

Two honest caveats on those numbers. The Flock figure is a vendor default, not a finding about which system any Utah agency ran or what setting it was on. The one-year figure is the Utah general schedule and a county sheriff series written to it — we could not source the specific published schedule for the agencies here, and material pulled into an active homicide investigative file is normally governed by the far longer felony-evidence retention rules in Utah Code sections 77-11c-301 through 77-11c-303 rather than by the routine dispatch schedule. Treat both as general retention practice, which is exactly why item 10 of the rider asks the custodian to state the schedule rather than leaving us to guess it.

The Honest Counterargument​

The strongest answer to this page is that the material has already been produced and nobody outside the case would know. The defense has received 45 discovery productions totalling 29,237 files through August 18, 2026, from an investigation spanning 40 agencies, delivered through a platform the defense has told the court is poorly suited to review at this scale. As of August 26, 2026 the defense reported detailed review complete on roughly 20 per cent of it. A CAD export and a radio archive could be sitting inside the 80 per cent not yet reached, in a file whose name says nothing about what it is — a problem the defense has described to the court in exactly those terms. Absence from the public docket here is close to meaningless.

The second answer is about stage. A preliminary hearing tests probable cause on the elements of the charge. It is not the forum for reconstructing an agency's afternoon, and a magistrate would properly cut off a dispatch-timeline cross as beyond scope. Counsel who spends bind-over credibility on a CAD log, then needs it at trial, has spent it twice. Reserving this for trial, or for a motion to compel after bind-over, is a defensible sequencing choice and not a lapse.

The third is the hardest, and it cuts at the thesis rather than the instrument. Multi-agency responses to mass-casualty events are chaotic by nature, and chaotic-sounding radio traffic is the normal texture of one. False tips, mistaken vehicle descriptions, plates that do not return, and units surveilling an address that turns out to hold other law enforcement are all things that happen in ordinary investigations that end in ordinary convictions. Federal personnel arriving first at an address in a case with FBI primacy is unremarkable. A CAD record that shows all of that shows a busy afternoon, not a diverted one — and this page has to be willing to publish that result if that is what the export says.

Sources On This Site​

:::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.