The Frontage Camera Canvass And The Retention Windows That Beat It

:::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

Walk the West 925 South frontage and the blocks around it door to door in the first week, log every camera we can see whether or not the owner talks to us, hand each identified owner a written preservation letter the same day — and separately demand the State's own canvass log, which is the one instrument on this page that still works today.

This is the plainest illustration in this whole section of what Doctrine 1 actually buys. Most instruments here argue about whether something should have been demanded. This one is arithmetic. Video evidence on private cameras is not withheld or suppressed — it is overwritten on a schedule, by machines nobody instructed, and once the counter rolls past it there is no order any court can enter that brings it back.

The State's own sworn paperwork says the canvass happened. Search warrant 3213811, sworn 12 September 2025, states in terms: "Following the shooting, detectives canvassed homes for video footage. Investigators located surveillance camera footage dated 09/11/2025 from the location of 680 W 925 S, Orem, Utah." The same affidavit describes that footage showing a vehicle park at about 00:23 and remain until about 01:20. So the canvass is not an inference from press coverage. It is a fact the State swore to, four days after the assassination, to get a warrant.

The sentence was sworn by Detective Michael George Carle of the Utah County Sheriff's Office, and it is written in the passive summary voice of an officer reporting other officers' work. Under Rule 602 that is a foundation question waiting to be asked: the affiant who tells a magistrate that a canvass happened is not necessarily the officer who conducted it. He does not appear on the certified witness roster we hold, so nobody has put that question to him in any transcript we can read.

That single sentence is the hinge. It establishes that a house-by-house video sweep of the residential blocks north of campus was conducted, that it produced at least one usable recording, and therefore that a canvass record exists — a list of addresses knocked, cameras seen, owners contacted, and footage taken or declined. A defense investigator wants two different things out of that neighbourhood, and only one of them is still gettable.

The retention arithmetic. These are general industry patterns, stated as general practice and not as a claim about any particular device on any particular street. Every figure below is the reason the calendar matters more than the paperwork:

System type	Typical retention	Window measured from 10 Sept 2025
Consumer doorbell camera, free tier	Nothing at all, or a few hours of live buffer	Effectively already gone the same day
Consumer doorbell camera, paid cloud plan	30 to 60 days	Closed between roughly 10 Oct and 9 Nov 2025
Small-business DVR or NVR, local disk	Overwrites at 14 to 30 days	Closed between roughly 24 Sept and 10 Oct 2025
Municipal and campus systems	Varies widely, commonly 30 to 90 days	Closed between roughly 10 Oct and 9 Dec 2025
A homeowner who downloaded a clip to a phone or laptop	Indefinite	Still open — and this is the only route that survives a year

Read the last row again, because it is the whole professional point. A canvass conducted in the week of 10 September 2025 recovers footage. The same canvass conducted at any point in 2026 recovers only what a private individual happened to save to a device they own. That window is shut and nothing reopens it. No subpoena, no court order, no agency cooperation. This is the physics of storage, not anybody's conduct, and this page says nothing at all about anybody's conduct.

The preservation letter, in full. It is one page, it needs no court, it needs no judge's signature, and an investigator can hand out forty of them in an afternoon. This is the highest-value-per-minute act in the entire exercise, and it is the one that had to happen in September 2025 or not at all:

Re: Request to preserve video recordings — 10 and 11 September 2025

We represent Tyler James Robinson in State of Utah v. Robinson, Fourth Judicial District Court, Utah County, case number 251403576. We are writing to ask you to preserve, and not to delete or allow to be overwritten, any video or still images recorded by any camera at your property between 12:00 a.m. on 10 September 2025 and 11:59 p.m. on 11 September 2025.

This includes recordings held in the cloud by your camera's service provider, recordings held on a local hard drive, memory card or base station, and any clip you have already downloaded or shared.

Many home camera systems delete recordings automatically after a set number of days. If yours does, the recordings from those dates may be deleted soon and cannot be recovered afterwards. The simplest way to preserve them is to download the files to a phone or computer you control and keep them unaltered.

You are not accused of anything and you are not required to give us anything. We are asking only that the recordings not be destroyed. If you prefer, you may preserve them and give them to no one until a court decides who is entitled to them.

Please contact the undersigned to confirm what you have preserved.

Note what that letter does not ask for. It does not ask for the footage. Asking for footage invites a no; asking someone not to delete something invites a shrug and a saved file. The demand comes later, once the bytes are safe.

Which is exactly why the canvass is about finding people, not serving paper. Paper reaches a company that still holds bytes. By 2026 the only holder left is a person, and you cannot subpoena a person you have not identified. That is a task with a shelf life, and the shelf life ran out a long time ago.

What The Defense Team Did Instead

The public record shows a defense that moved on preservation early and won on it. On 8 October 2025 counsel filed a Motion to Preserve Evidence (Dkt. #75), asking 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, and to give notice before any potentially destructive testing. The court granted it on 20 October 2025 (Dkt. #107). The State moved to set that order aside as prematurely entered (Dkt. #116) and argued, citing Bakalov and Tiedemann, that it should not have to give notice before destructive testing at all. On 4 November 2025 Judge Graf entered a stipulated order that set the first order aside, granted the motion in part, and — on the point the State had contested hardest — kept the notice requirement, with a 14-day objection window and a definition of "potentially destructive" covering anything likely to consume an item or change its character. On the merits of that fight the defense got what it asked for.

The limit is structural, not a matter of anyone's judgment. Read paragraph 2 of that stipulated order: it binds "the Utah County Attorney's Office, its agents and any law enforcement agencies involved in the investigation," as to "all evidence in their custody or under their control." A private cloud account belonging to a resident of a residential block is not in the State's custody, is not under the State's control, and no order directed at the State can reach it. A preservation order and a preservation letter are different instruments with different targets, and the second one is not a court document at all.

On the third-party half, what the archive we hold shows is thin. The State's 3 April 2026 opposition to continuing the preliminary hearing describes its own late disclosures and lists, among them, "doorbell surveillance from a single property (provided January 21, 2026)." The State's 6 May 2026 witness and exhibit list carries that as part of Exhibit 12, Bates 15215-15226, disclosed 1/21/2026 — alongside the UVU surveillance tranches at Bates 18-20, 880-89 and 1448-1463 from October 2025. Exhibit 13 on that same list is a written Rule 1102 statement from an occupant of that residence, and it appears with no Bates number and no disclosure date filled in. A canvass that knocked on a block produced, in the exhibit set, one property's footage.

No filing in the archive we hold is a subpoena, preservation demand, or motion to compel directed at a neighbourhood camera owner, a doorbell-platform operator, or the canvass log itself. Counsel do use subpoenas here — a defense Subpoena for Sgt. Hull was filed 12 January 2026 — so the tool is plainly in use. Our archive is also demonstrably partial: it holds 374 PDFs against 867 known docket entries, of which only 258 ever had a public PDF. The filings in this case are under a gag order and are partly sealed, so absence from what we hold is a fact about our shelf, not about the case.

Where This Belongs In The Case

Stage of the case	When that stage runs	Status of this step
Immediate investigation — preservation letters, door-to-door log	11 Sept to 10 Oct 2025; the windows above	Window closed for cloud and DVR retention
Pretrial discovery (Rule 16) — the State's canvass log	From arraignment onward; available now	Still fully open, and the demand still works
Preliminary hearing cross	6-10 July 2026 — completed	Not found in the certified transcripts we hold
Motion practice after bind-over	Bind-over oral argument set 1 Sept 2026	Not yet due; 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 record we hold
Rule 16 demand for the canvass log — addresses knocked, cameras observed, footage taken or declined	Utah County Attorney's Office; Orem City Police; UVU Police; ATF	n/a	No such demand found in the archive we hold
Cross-examination — witness testified under a certified transcript	Jennifer Faumuina, SBI sergeant, who testified her assignment "throughout the case was to oversee the crime scenes as well as the physical evidence"	Yes — 7 July and 9 July 2026	Certified Day 4 does not show the neighbourhood video canvass pursued
Cross-examination — the officer who swore the canvass sentence	Detective Michael George Carle, Utah County Sheriff's Office, affiant on warrant 3213811	Not known to have testified in this case	Not on the certified witness roster we hold; a witness we would call
Cross-examination — the agent who handled the surrender and booking	Brian Davis, agent, Utah State Bureau of Investigation	Yes — 8 July and 9 July 2026	Certified Day 4 does not show any neighbourhood-video line pursued
Cross-examination — the UVU surveillance witness	David Hull, sergeant, campus video foundation	Yes — 6 and 7 July 2026	Days 1-3 are not certified; not checkable at T1
Preservation letter — not a subpoena, no court needed	Each identified camera owner on the frontage	n/a	Nothing of this kind is visible on the public record
Third-party subpoena duces tecum	Any merchant, fleet operator, or delivery firm with a route-facing camera on the block	n/a	No such subpoena found in the archive we hold
GRAMA request, running in parallel with discovery	Orem City Police records officer; UVU records officer	n/a	Templates are published on this site; see below

The Questions That Were Not Asked

Addressed to Sergeant Jennifer Faumuina on the certified Day 4 record, where she described overseeing the crime scenes and the physical evidence throughout the case:

Sergeant, warrant 3213811 says detectives canvassed homes for video footage. Who kept the list of which homes were knocked on?
Is there a written canvass log in this case — a document showing addresses contacted, dates, and what was collected at each one?
How many separate properties gave investigators video from that canvass?
When a resident said they had a camera but no saved footage, was that recorded anywhere?
When a resident declined to give footage, was the address recorded anywhere?
Was any resident given anything in writing asking them to save what they had before it overwrote itself?
On what date did investigators last knock on a door in those blocks looking for video?
Do you know what the retention setting was on the camera at 680 West 925 South before its footage was collected?
You testified that the UVU video you first had was, in your words, "pretty grainy," and that you were "later actually able to get the footage directly from UVU." Was the same thing ever done for neighbourhood cameras — going back to the original device rather than working from a copy?
Does the evidence inventory in this case contain any doorbell or residential camera item other than the one property?
Were the residential blocks immediately north of Campus Drive canvassed for cameras facing the street, or only for cameras that happened to face the suspected route?
Was any camera on the frontage of a university-owned residential property on that block identified during the canvass?

Addressed to Detective Michael George Carle of the Utah County Sheriff's Office, who swore the affidavit for warrant 3213811 and is not on the certified witness roster we hold. These are the questions we would put to him if we called him:

Detective, you swore that "detectives canvassed homes for video footage." Did you knock on any of those doors yourself?
If you did not, whose report were you summarising when you wrote that sentence?
Which agency ran that canvass — Orem City Police, UVU Police, the Utah County Sheriff's Office, ATF, FBI, or a combination?
Did the canvass produce a written report, and is that report in the discovery produced in this case?
Your affidavit says the recording showed a vehicle park at about 00:23 and remain until about 01:20. Where did those two timestamps come from — the device's own clock, the platform's server, or an investigator reading the file?
Was that camera's clock ever compared to a reference clock?
Preliminary-hearing coverage of this same recording has described the parking event at about 00:30. Which figure is the native one, and where does the difference come from?
Did you seek video from any address on that block other than the one you named in the affidavit?

Why A Defense Attorney Would Want This

This page serves Route 2 — the investigation itself, and it needs no alternative perpetrator to do its work. The jury will be asked to accept that the residential corridor north of campus was searched for video and that everything relevant came back. A canvass log answers a question the jury cannot otherwise reach: how wide was the net, and what fell through it? If the log shows forty doors knocked and one property's footage retained, that is a fact about the completeness of the investigation, and it is a fact the State itself created and still holds.

It is also the cheapest ask in the whole section. A canvass log costs nothing to produce, touches no classified holding, requires no federal agency to waive anything, and sits in a Utah county file. A judge who would never order an intelligence service to answer a subpoena will order a prosecutor to produce a police canvass sheet without blinking. And a refusal is also an answer — if the response is that no canvass log exists, then the State swore to a canvass in a warrant application and cannot now produce the record of it, which is itself a cross-examination.

The three demands separate cleanly, and a page like this is worthless if it does not say which is which:

Still works today. The State's canvass log, the addresses-contacted list, the collection reports, and the device-level metadata for the one property's footage already in evidence. All reachable by Rule 16 demand, motion to compel, or GRAMA request.
Still works today, narrowly. Any resident who downloaded a clip to their own device in September 2025 and still has it. Reachable only by finding the person, which is what a canvass is for.
Gone. Every cloud-held and DVR-held recording on that block that nobody downloaded. No instrument on earth recovers it.

The Washington County lobby video is the cautionary case already inside this record. Citizen-research commentary collected on this site reports that a news organisation requested that footage, was not given it, and was later told it had passed a thirty-day retention policy. Whatever the truth of that account, it describes the exact mechanism this page is about, operating on a government system with a written schedule. Private consumer cameras have shorter schedules and no schedule at all.

The Rule 16 rider, as it would be served. This is the instrument that still works today and it is served on the Utah County Attorney's Office, with copies to the records officers of the Orem City Police Department and the Utah Valley University Police Department:

Pursuant to Rule 16 of the Utah Rules of Criminal Procedure, article I, sections 7 and 12 of the Utah Constitution, and the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, Defendant requests the following, for the period 10 September 2025 through 31 December 2025:

Every canvass log, canvass worksheet, neighbourhood-contact sheet, or equivalent record generated by any agency in connection with the collection of residential or commercial video recordings in the area bounded by 800 South, 1000 South, 600 West and 800 West in Orem, Utah, including any record identifying an address contacted, the date and time of contact, the presence or absence of a camera, and whether footage was collected, declined, or unavailable.

Every report, supplemental report or investigator's note describing the canvass referred to in the affidavit for search warrant number 3213811 at the sentence beginning "Following the shooting, detectives canvassed homes for video footage."

Every evidence-intake, property or chain-of-custody record for any residential or commercial video recording obtained from an address in that area, whether or not the State intends to offer it.

For each such recording, the native file as received, the device or platform it came from, the file-level metadata, and any record of the device clock or the platform's server time being compared to a reference clock.

Every written or recorded communication between any investigating agency and any camera owner, doorbell-platform operator, or cloud-storage provider concerning the preservation, retention or production of recordings from that area.

Every record reflecting a request for such recordings that was made and not fulfilled, including any record of a retention period having expired.

The identity of the agency and the supervising officer responsible for the canvass.

If any responsive record does not exist, Defendant requests a written statement to that effect identifying which category is empty.

Paragraph 6 is the one that matters most and it is the one most likely to be answered with silence. Paragraph 7 tells us who to put on the stand.

Day-one date: our attorney serves written preservation letters on every identified camera owner on the frontage on 12 September 2025, the day of the initial appearance, and completes the door-to-door camera log by 19 September 2025. On 12 September the paid-tier cloud clips were roughly 28 days from expiry and the small-business DVRs roughly 12 days. The Rule 16 demand for the State's canvass log goes out the same week and is the only one of the three that would read identically if it were served this morning.

One more thing survives even after the footage does not: the log of camera positions. A photograph of a doorbell unit above a porch, taken in September 2025, still proves in 2026 that a camera pointed at that street on that date. It cannot show what the camera saw. It can show that something was there to see it, and that is the foundation for asking what became of the recording.

The Honest Counterargument

The strongest answer is that the canvass worked and the yield was genuinely one property. Door-to-door video sweeps mostly come back empty. Many houses have no camera; many cameras point at a porch, not a street; many are on free tiers holding nothing; many owners are not home; many clips are unusable at night. Investigators who knock forty doors and leave with one good file have had an ordinary day, not a suspicious one. Reading a thin yield as a thin effort is a mistake a jury can be talked out of in one sentence by a competent prosecutor.

Second, the defense may already hold the canvass file. The State has an open-file policy on the docket, told the court that as of 1 April 2026 it had provided "approximately 100% of discoverable material in its possession," and has produced an enormous corpus — dozens of productions and tens of thousands of files. A police canvass report is exactly the mundane material that would sit inside that corpus without ever generating a filing. Nothing would appear on the public docket, and nothing has.

Third, this is a preliminary hearing, and the purpose of a preliminary hearing is probable cause and nothing else. Under State v. Lopez the magistrate does not weigh contradictory or impeachment evidence, and hearsay is admissible. Spending certified cross-examination minutes on the completeness of a video canvass, at a hearing where completeness is not the question, would be a poor trade against a bind-over that was going to happen anyway. Holding the canvass log for trial, where completeness is the question, is a normal and defensible sequencing choice.

Fourth, and most uncomfortable for this page: our own preservation letters would probably have failed too. A letter from a defense investigator carries no compulsion. A homeowner who does not want to be involved in a capital case throws it away. The honest claim is not that we would have saved the block's footage. It is that we would have created a dated record of which cameras existed and which owners were asked, and that record would still be worth something now, when the footage is not.

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​

What The Defense Team Did Instead​

Where This Belongs In The Case​

Witness Or Discovery Target​

The Questions That Were Not Asked​

Why A Defense Attorney Would Want This​

The Honest Counterargument​

Sources On This Site​