They reviewed videos. Not just the video of my morning, though that video mattered, and not just the cameras on my house, though those mattered too. They reviewed videos from incidents across fourteen other communities, in Manatee and Sarasota and DeSoto counties, places with names like Gulf Hammock and Cypress Glen and Magnolia Trace, where residents had been detained and threatened and handcuffed and searched by people who were not police officers. Some of those videos were clear. Some were partial. Some were taken on phones by frightened neighbors through windows. All of them went into the file, and the file got heavier, and the picture got clearer.
They interviewed victims. That was the hardest part to watch, and I watched it from the outside, because I was a witness now and a source, not an agent, and the Bureau did the interviewing, not me. The victims were mostly elderly. They still lived behind the same gates. Palmetto had driven the same streets and knew where everybody lived, and even after the arrests, fear does not evaporate on command. Some residents talked easily, relieved that someone was finally writing it down. Some talked slowly, stopping and starting, afraid that telling the truth would bring trouble back to their door. Some would not talk at all, and the investigators respected that, and they worked with what they had, because a victim who will not talk is still a victim, and a case that depends on forcing people to relive the worst afternoon of their lives is a case built on sand.
The six deaths Raymond had documented received renewed forensic attention. I want to be careful here, the way the investigators were careful, and the way Raymond himself was careful when he sat at my kitchen table with his accordion file and said that he was not saying Palmetto had killed six people. He was saying that six deaths involved encounters nobody had seriously examined, and that distinction was the whole case in miniature. It was the difference between an accusation and a question, and questions, asked properly, are more powerful than accusations, because questions demand answers and accusations only demand sides.
Some of those deaths remained medically ambiguous. I will not pretend otherwise, and neither did the investigators. A man with severe heart disease who dies during a stressful encounter may have died because of the encounter, or he may have died when he would have died anyway, and medicine does not always give you a clean line between those two things. A woman who fell during a struggle and died weeks later leaves a gap between the fall and the death, and in that gap live a dozen other causes, and a dozen other explanations, and a prosecutor who charges murder on that record is a prosecutor who is going to lose, and losing badly would have hurt every other part of the case. The investigators knew that. They said so, plainly, and I respected them for it, because it would have been easier to promise six murder charges and let the headlines do the work.
Others did not remain ambiguous. That was the other half of the truth, and it was the half that kept me going through the slow months. One case involved a seventy-six-year-old man who suffered cardiac arrest after being restrained face-down during an HOA parking dispute. A parking dispute. Not a robbery. Not a riot. A dispute about where a car was parked, and a seventy-six-year-old man ended up face-down on the ground with people holding him there, and his heart stopped. The forensic review looked at the restraint, and the duration, and the position, and the man's medical history, and it did not look away from any of it, and what it found was serious enough to charge.
Another case involved an elderly woman who fell after a Taser discharge. I thought about that one for a long time, because it was so close to my own morning. I had been Tased and I had fallen, and I had gotten up with a contusion and a strain. She had been Tased and she had fallen, and she had not gotten up the same way. Age changes everything about a fall. Bone density changes everything.