Subpoena The FBO And Ground-Handling Records

:::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 the fixed-base operator, the on-field maintenance provider, the fuel vendor and the ground handlers at Provo Municipal Airport for 4 through 13 September 2025 — and file a GRAMA request the same week for the airport authority's own ramp, badge and camera records.

An ADS-B trace shows where an aircraft was. Ground records show what it did, and sometimes who was aboard. Those are two different evidentiary animals, and the second is the one a defense actually needs. This site's own flight-data charter states the rule plainly: a trace proves presence, never purpose, and never occupancy. The KPVU airport page says the same thing in its own words — a row there is an airframe, not a person.

Everything the citizen investigation has assembled about these aircraft comes from transponder data, and transponder data has a hard ceiling. It cannot tell you whether the crew stayed on board or went to a hotel, whether four people got off or nine, whether the aircraft took on 1,200 gallons or none, whether a car was ordered to the stand, or whether anyone signed anything. Every one of those questions is answered by a piece of paper that a private company files for its own accounting reasons.

That is what makes this instrument unusual in this investigation. The targets are private parties, not agencies in an adversarial posture. A fixed-base operator has no institutional interest in this case. It has an interest in its receivables. The Provo Municipal Airport is a department of the City of Provo, which means its own records are reachable by an ordinary GRAMA request that anybody can file, with no court and no case.

And the ramp was not empty. On 10 September 2025, the recovered ground record at Provo holds two Egyptian-registered aircraft — SU-BTT on the ground until 13:13 UTC and SU-BND parked all day — alongside five Kirk-side aircraft (N102DZ, N888KG, N40JD, N872RA, N560TW) and a survey aircraft (N59906). Every one of them touched a ramp, and a ramp generates paper.

The rider, item by item

Each row is one document class, the party that actually holds it, and the single fact it settles that ADS-B cannot.

#	Document demanded	Who holds it	What it settles that a transponder cannot
1	Ramp and parking record: tail number, arrival and departure times, stand or tie-down assignment	The FBO; the airport authority for overnight and long-term parking	Where on the field the aircraft actually sat, and next to what
2	Fuel uplift ticket — signed, timestamped, naming aircraft, operator and quantity	The FBO and the into-plane fuel vendor	That a named human being stood at that aircraft at a stated minute
3	Ground-handling service order and its invoice	The FBO or handling agent	Which services were actually bought, and by whom
4	General declaration and CBP-facing paperwork for any international arrival or departure	The operator, the handler, and CBP	How many persons were aboard on entry and on exit
5	Catering order; lavatory and potable-water service ticket; GPU order	The FBO, the caterer, the line service crew	Headcount, meal count, and whether the aircraft was crewed or cold
6	Crew and passenger transport arrangement — the car ordered to the ramp, and who ordered it	The FBO's front desk; the ground-transport or rental vendor	That someone left the ramp, and where they were taken
7	FBO visitor log and lobby sign-in	The FBO	Who came to meet the aircraft from the landside
8	Ramp-access badge issuance and swipe record, with the access-control system's own audit log	The airport authority under 49 C.F.R. Part 1542	Which badge opened which gate, at which minute
9	CCTV covering the ramp position, with the retention window stated in writing	The airport authority and the FBO	What actually happened at the stand
10	Part 145 work order, parts list, and approval for return to service	The on-field repair station	Whether the stated reason for the visit is the documented reason
11	Hangar, tie-down or long-term parking agreement and its monthly invoices	The airport authority and the FBO	Who the operator's US agent is, by name and signature
12	The trip file held by the trip-support provider	Universal, Jeppesen, World Kinect, Avfuel, Colt or similar	Everything above, in one folder, for the whole trip

Row 12 is the one most people miss. International business aviation is arranged through a trip-support company, and that company's trip file is normally richer than anything the individual FBO holds: permits, slots, handling requests, fuel releases, crew and passenger counts, hotel bookings and ground transport, all under one trip number.

Which field, and why it is not only Provo

A single-airport subpoena is the beginner's version of this instrument. The aircraft that matter here touched several fields in the same week, and different fields hold different documents. Asking the wrong custodian for the right document is how a demand comes back empty and gets written up as a refusal.

Field	What happened there	The document that field holds
KPVU — Provo, UT	Eight tracked aircraft on the ramp on 10 September 2025; a months-long parking stay by SU-BND	Ramp and parking record, fuel tickets, badge swipes, CCTV, Part 145 work orders, the hangar or tie-down agreement
KMOT — Minot, ND	SU-BTT cleared US entry here before flying the domestic leg into Provo on 4 September	The inbound manifest and any customs paperwork. This is a North Dakota record, not a Utah one
KILG — Wilmington, DE	SU-BTT's destination on 10 September, and a well-established East Coast customs and fuel stop	The outbound manifest — the headcount leaving the United States, against which the inbound headcount is subtracted

That last row is the whole of the passenger claim, expressed as arithmetic. The public allegation is that people came off these aircraft in Provo and were not aboard when the aircraft left the country. Whether that is true or false, it is a subtraction between two numbers that exist on two documents at two named airports. Nobody visible has asked for either one.

What The Defense Team Did Instead

The tool itself is demonstrably in use in this case. The certified Day 4 transcript records the State establishing that law enforcement served a subpoena on Discord and recovered messages through it (Day 4, page 70, lines 2 to 4). On the docket, the defense filed a Notice of Subpoena Duces Tecum to the Utah County Sheriff's Department on 4-1-26 (dockets 468 and 495), subpoenaed Sgt. David Hull on 1-12-26 (dockets 288 and 291), and litigated an Application for Certificate for Attendance of Out-of-State Witness under Utah Code § 77-21-3 all the way to a written order on 6-22-26. Third-party process is not foreign to this case. It is routine in it.

What is not visible in the material we hold is any of it pointed at an aviation ground record. We searched both certified preliminary-hearing transcripts — Day 4, 9 July 2026 and Day 5, 10 July 2026 — for airport, aircraft, plane, flight, hangar, tarmac, ramp, FBO, fuel, charter, jet, Duncan and Provo Municipal. Day 5 returns nothing at all. Day 4 returns nothing beyond the word "fuels" inside a transparency argument and a stray index entry. Neither certified day shows this line being pursued.

The same is true one level up, in the primary record itself. This site's SU-BTT page records that no dated work order, invoice or release-to-service for any individual visit by that aircraft — Provo, Lincoln or Wichita — has been published by anyone, and the Provo field page records that no manifest exists in public for any of the arrivals. The gap is not that the documents were refused. It is that nobody visible has asked a private company for them.

That absence is a fact about the public record, and it is the whole of what we assert. The archive we hold runs to 374 PDFs against 867 known docket entries, only 258 of which ever had a public PDF at all, and the filings are gagged and partly sealed.

Where This Belongs In The Case

Stage of the case	When that stage runs	Status of this step
GRAMA request to the City of Provo (no case required)	Available from 11 September 2025 onward	Not found in the material we hold
Pretrial third-party subpoena, Utah R. Crim. P. 14	From the filing of the information onward; available now	No such notice in the archive we hold
Preliminary hearing cross	July 6-10, 2026 — completed	Not found in the certified transcripts we hold
Trial-phase discovery and Rule 902(11) certification	After bind-over; bind-over argument 1 September 2026	Not yet due

The case has not been bound over. The 6-22-26 order is explicit that a preliminary hearing "is not a discovery device," so a records subpoena aimed at building a defense case was never going to land at that stage. This is a trial-phase instrument that a GRAMA request could have front-run by eleven months.

How each demand is actually served

Three different mechanisms reach these three different kinds of custodian, and mixing them up wastes months.

The Utah private party. A subpoena duces tecum under Utah R. Crim. P. 14, issued by counsel of record, with the notice this court's docket shows the defense filing on 4-1-26. The recipient's only real defence is Rule 14(a)(2) — the court "may quash or modify the subpoena if compliance would be unreasonable," the exact standard applied in the 22 June 2026 order. So the rider is drawn narrow: named tail numbers, a ten-day window, named document classes. A rider that asks for "all records relating to Egypt" gets quashed and deserves to be.
The out-of-state custodian. Signature Aviation, Duncan Aviation's headquarters in Lincoln, Nebraska, and every trip-support provider are outside Utah. That is Utah Code § 77-21-3 certificate practice — the same route the defense used for the Twiggs application. The 22 June order is a warning: the court weighed "burdens upon a nonresident witness and a sister-state court" as part of the reasonableness analysis. Ask for documents by mail, not for a person to travel, and most of that burden argument disappears.
The government custodian. Provo Municipal Airport is a City of Provo department, so GRAMA, Utah Code § 63G-2, applies and no case is needed. Section 63G-2-204 sets an ordinary response deadline of ten business days, or five on an expedited showing. A denial is appealed to the entity's chief administrative officer under § 63G-2-401, and from there to the State Records Committee — a path that has already produced nine written Decision and Orders on Kirk-related records in this matter.

Getting the paper into evidence once it arrives

A subpoenaed document is worthless if it cannot be admitted. This is the point where the FBO instrument is easier than the ADS-B one, and it is worth being precise about why.

A fuel ticket, a handling invoice and a ramp log are records of a regularly conducted activity — business records under Utah R. Evid. 803(6). Under Rule 902(11) a domestic record of that kind is self-authenticating if the custodian signs a written certification, with reasonable written notice to the other side. No live witness has to fly to Provo. A certification page stapled to a fuel ticket puts the fuel ticket in front of the jury. Foreign records take the same route through Rule 902(12).

That is a genuinely different position from a transponder trace, which has no business-records custodian anywhere because no business made it. Aviation ground paperwork was built to be audited, and the rules of evidence were built for exactly that kind of paper.

Witness Or Discovery Target

How it would be done	Target	Took the stand?	Status on the public record
Rule 14 subpoena duces tecum, private party	Signature Flight Support — identified as the transient-handling FBO on the airport's own badge roster	n/a	No such subpoena in the archive we hold
Rule 14 subpoena duces tecum, private party	Duncan Aviation — the FAA Part 145 repair station on the field, holder of an Egyptian Air Force maintenance account since 1999	n/a	No such subpoena in the archive we hold
Rule 14 subpoena duces tecum, private party	The into-plane fuel vendor and fuel-program administrator for those uplifts	n/a	Vendor not identified in any public document we hold
GRAMA request, Utah Code § 63G-2	City of Provo / Provo Municipal Airport — ramp log, badge issuance and swipe audit, CCTV, parking agreements	n/a	A badge roster from `airport.provo.gov` circulates; no request or response is in our archive
Out-of-state certificate, Utah Code § 77-21-3	Records custodian of a trip-support provider headquartered outside Utah	n/a	Not found in the material we hold
Federal request or MLAT	CBP eAPIS manifests for the inbound and outbound international legs	n/a	Unreachable by private process
Cross-examination — witness testified	Jennifer Faumuina, crime-scene sergeant, evidence routing	Yes — 7 and 9 July 2026	Certified Day 4 shows no aviation-record question
Cross-examination — witness testified	Agent Brian Davis, State case agent, collected the defendant's vehicle	Yes — 8 and 9 July 2026	Certified Day 4 shows no aviation-record question

The Questions That Were Not Asked

Sergeant Faumuina, in the days after 10 September 2025, did this investigation request any record from any business operating at Provo Municipal Airport?
Was any fuel ticket, ramp log, handling invoice or aircraft parking record collected as evidence in this case?
Agent Davis, does the evidence inventory in this case contain a single document generated at an airport?
Was a preservation letter sent to Provo Municipal Airport, to any fixed-base operator, or to any maintenance provider on that field, at any time?
Was closed-circuit video from Provo Municipal Airport requested before its retention period expired, and if so, on what date was the request made?
Who in this investigation decided that the aircraft on the Provo ramp that week were not worth a records request — the Sheriff's Office, the State Bureau of Investigation, or a federal partner?
Was that decision documented anywhere, in any report, in any form?
If the answer to any of the above is "the federal partners handled it," did you personally see the request, or were you told about it?
Sergeant Faumuina, when a piece of evidence in this case was routed to a laboratory, who chose the laboratory — you, your agency, or a federal partner?
Was any preservation instruction issued to any private business in Utah County in September 2025, other than to a business already named in the charging documents?
Agent Davis, is there a written investigative plan for this case, and does it contain the word "airport"?
Did anyone in this investigation interview a line-service technician, a fuel attendant, a ramp agent, or a front-desk employee at Provo Municipal Airport?

And, to a records custodian at a certification hearing rather than to a police witness:

Does your company issue a fuel ticket for every uplift, without exception, and is that ticket signed by the person who performed it?
For how long does your company retain fuel tickets, and is that period set by policy, by contract, or by your tax filings?
What is the overwrite interval on the cameras covering the ramp positions, and was any hold ever placed on that footage for the period 4 to 13 September 2025?
Did anyone — from any agency, at any level of government — ask your company for any record concerning any aircraft on your ramp between 4 and 13 September 2025?

Questions 6 through 8 are the Rule 602 sequence this case turns on again and again. Almost every federal decision in this matter has reached the courtroom secondhand, through a Utah officer repeating what a federal officer said. A witness who cannot say who made a routing decision cannot be cross-examined about why it was made — and that is itself the answer a defense wants the jury to hear.

Why A Defense Attorney Would Want This

This page serves Route 2 — the investigation itself. It needs no alternative perpetrator and it does not depend on the aircraft meaning anything. It asks a much smaller question that a juror can hold in one hand: forty government agencies worked this case, eight tracked aircraft sat five miles from the killing on the day it happened, and no airport record is visible anywhere in the public file.

The fuel ticket deserves its own paragraph, because it is the best document on the list and almost nobody asks for it. A fuel uplift ticket is signed by a human being. It is timestamped to the minute. It names the aircraft, usually the operator, the quantity delivered and the price. And critically, the FBO keeps it because it is an accounting document, not an operational one. Operational paperwork gets purged on a schedule somebody wrote once and nobody reviews. Accounting paperwork survives, because it backs an invoice, a fuel-tax filing and an audit. Under 26 U.S.C. § 6001 a fuel vendor has to keep the records supporting its excise-tax returns. When operational records are gone, ask for the receivables. That is a real piece of tradecraft and it is worth more than any theory on this page.

One more piece of practical detail about fuel, because it decides who to serve. Business-aviation fuel usually moves through two parties, not one: the FBO does the physical uplift, while the transaction itself runs on a contract fuel program — Avfuel, World Kinect, Colt, Everest and similar — which issues a fuel release naming the operator and the trip before the truck ever moves. That means the same uplift is documented twice, by two independent companies, and the release usually names the trip and the operator more precisely than the ramp ticket does. Serve both. If one has purged, the other frequently has not.

The regulatory floors are worth knowing exactly, because they tell you what is still alive:

14 C.F.R. § 145.219 — still open. A Part 145 repair station must retain its records for at least two years from the date the article was approved for return to service. Work done at Provo in September 2025 must still be on file until roughly September 2027. This is the one window on the whole page that has not closed.
14 C.F.R. § 139.321 — closed. The airport certificate holder must inspect each tenant fueling agent quarterly and keep the record for 12 consecutive calendar months. The mandatory floor for September 2025 ran out around September 2026.
49 C.F.R. Part 1542, §§ 1542.207 and 1542.211 — the badge system. A TSA-approved airport security program requires controlled access to the secured area and an identification-media system. The roster exported from airport.provo.gov on 09/11/25, the day after the killing, is the visible output of exactly that system. No request for the swipe audit log behind it appears anywhere in the material we hold.
19 C.F.R. § 122.22 — the manifest. Private aircraft entering or leaving the United States transmit a manifest of everyone aboard to CBP through eAPIS before the flight. The public claim about these aircraft is that people got off in Provo and were not aboard when the aircraft left the country from Wilmington. That claim is a subtraction between two manifest headcounts, and the operator's and handler's own copies are private documents.

CCTV retention is the day-one argument, and it is unanswerable. FBO and airport ramp cameras typically overwrite on a 30 to 90 day cycle. A written demand served in September or October 2025 recovers footage of the Provo ramp on 10 September that no demand served today can recover. That window did not narrow. It closed, permanently, sometime in late 2025, and nothing any court orders in 2026 reopens it.

A refusal is also an answer, and this instrument produces one either way. If Provo Municipal returns the ramp log and the badge audit, the defense has documents. If it returns nothing because the retention period ran, the defense has a dated letter saying a public airport destroyed its record of the week Charlie Kirk was killed five miles away, with no agency having asked it not to. If a private company declines and the State declines to help compel it, the defense has that too. Question 16 above is the one that cannot be answered badly for us. Either somebody asked for these records in September 2025 and the answer has never surfaced in discovery, or nobody asked at all — and a jury is entitled to know which.

And the control discipline applies here exactly as it applies to the archives. Before anyone calls a missing FBO record a removal, the identical request must be made for an unrelated comparison aircraft at the same facility in the same window — say, three ordinary transient jets handled at Provo the same week. If the FBO cannot produce a fuel ticket for those either, the absence is that company's recordkeeping and not suppression. This investigation has already had to retract a published finding for skipping that step on a tracking website, and it does not get a second free one.

Day-one date: 2025-09-15. A GRAMA request to the City of Provo needs no case, no counsel and no court, so it goes out three days after our attorney is retained, with Rule 14 subpoenas duces tecum following on 16 September at the initial appearance. Served that week, the demand reaches the ramp CCTV inside its overwrite cycle, the badge-swipe audit log for 4 to 13 September while it is still online, the fueling-agent inspection record inside its 12-month floor, and the line-service staff who fuelled those aircraft while they still work there and still remember the week. Served today, it reaches the Part 145 work order and the accounting records, and nothing else.

The Honest Counterargument

The plain reading of the Provo visits is maintenance, and the documents may well confirm it. Duncan Aviation has held an Egyptian Air Force maintenance account since 1999. Two Provo-to-Provo closed-loop sorties in the record — 55 and 68 minutes — are the textbook signature of a post-maintenance functional check flight. A work order that says "avionics, returned to service" is the most likely thing at the end of this subpoena, and a defense that has told a jury the paper matters then has to live with what the paper says.

Foreign state aircraft may generate less paper, not more. An Egyptian Air Force registration operating on a diplomatic clearance is not necessarily processed like a civil private aircraft. The ordinary eAPIS manifest regime may not have applied, protocol handling may have bypassed the FBO front desk entirely, and the headcount subtraction the whole theory rests on may have no document behind it in any private file anywhere.

The customs record is not even a Utah record. This site established from primary position data that SU-BTT reached Provo on 4 September 2025 on a domestic leg inbound from Minot, North Dakota, and that every Egyptian-fleet Provo arrival in 2025 entered the United States somewhere else. Whoever was aboard cleared entry in North Dakota. A subpoena aimed at Provo for arrival paperwork is aimed at the wrong field, and getting that wrong in open court would cost more than the document is worth.

A court may simply find it irrelevant. The strongest defense in this case is the mechanism of death, and mechanism does not need an Egyptian jet. A judge weighing Rule 14(a)(2) reasonableness — the standard the court already applied on 22 June 2026 — can reasonably conclude that a fishing expedition through a fuel vendor's receivables burdens a third party without tending to prove or disprove anything about a wound. That objection is not frivolous, and the alternative-perpetrator notice has to be on file first for the relevance argument to have anywhere to stand.

Finally, silence here is cheap to explain. Counsel of record may already hold every one of these documents in discovery. Forty-five discovery productions and 29,237 files have changed hands. An FBO invoice that came in a 2026 production and showed nothing is exactly the kind of thing a competent defense reads once and never mentions again.

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.

The One Thing We Would Do Differently​

The rider, item by item​

Which field, and why it is not only Provo​

What The Defense Team Did Instead​

Where This Belongs In The Case​

How each demand is actually served​

Getting the paper into evidence once it arrives​

Witness Or Discovery Target​

The Questions That Were Not Asked​

Why A Defense Attorney Would Want This​

The Honest Counterargument​

Sources On This Site​