Kowalski looked at Dempsey. "Did she tell you the boy was her boyfriend?"
Dempsey said yes, but added that he did not believe her.
Kowalski looked at his partner. The look they exchanged said more than either officer was willing to say aloud while standing next to Dempsey. Neither man had been present for the initial contact, so they did not pretend to know more than they knew. But they had a handcuffed teenager, a visibly distressed witness whose account was detailed and internally consistent, and an officer whose explanation kept changing depending on which part of the encounter he was describing. The first priority was no longer defending Dempsey's assumptions. It was figuring out whether there had ever been a lawful reason to put Austin in the back seat at all.
Kowalski walked to the cruiser and opened the back door. He helped Austin out of the back seat and removed the handcuffs himself. Austin stood on the road and rubbed his wrists. His face showed the full weight of what he had just been through, not anger yet, but something closer to disbelief mixed with pain.
His jeans had grass stains on the knees from where he had been driven into the ground, and his left shoulder was sore from the impact. Kowalski told Austin and Chloe directly that they were free to go and that he was sorry for what had happened. His partner said the same thing to Chloe.
Both teenagers accepted the apologies without saying much because there was not much anyone could say that would make the previous 20 minutes make sense. Austin called his father while still standing on the road. When his father answered, Austin told him what had happened in the flat, careful voice of someone holding himself together by concentrating on facts rather than feelings.
His father told him not to move and said he was coming. Chloe called her parents next and told them the same story.
While Austin and Chloe waited, Kowalski pulled Dempsey aside and spoke to him in a voice that did not carry. Whatever was said between them resulted in Kowalski calling his supervisor over his personal radio and requesting that a sergeant respond to the location. He also told Dempsey to stay with his vehicle and not to leave.
The parents arrived before the sergeant did. Austin's father got out of his car and walked straight to his son. He looked at him, looked at the grass stains and the marks on his wrists, and said nothing for a moment. Then he took out his phone and called the family's attorney.
Chloe's parents arrived two minutes later and went straight to their daughter. Her mother held her while she cried properly for the first time since the whole thing had started.
The sergeant arrived and was briefed by Kowalski away from both families and away from Dempsey. Kowalski kept his account factual and short. The body-camera footage would tell the full story, but what Kowalski had already seen and heard at the scene was enough for the sergeant to make two decisions before he had reviewed anything.
The first was that Dempsey needed to come back to the station. The second was that the body-camera footage needed to be secured and reviewed before the night was over.
Dempsey was directed to follow the sergeant back to the station, and both vehicles left the park. Austin's father watched them go and then looked at Kowalski.
"My son is 17 years old. He was on a date. He reached for his phone."
Kowalski did not argue with any of that. He gave Austin's father the incident report number and told him to contact the department in the morning regarding the formal complaint process.
Austin's father looked at him and said he would not be contacting the department first. He would be contacting his attorney. He already had. His response was not theatrical. It was controlled, almost quiet, but there was nothing uncertain about it. He had arrived to find his son shaken, marked at the wrists, and trying to explain an encounter that had begun while he was on a date and ended with him face down in the grass. For Austin's father, the question was no longer whether someone at the department would apologize. The question was what record would exist tomorrow, what the body camera showed, and whether the officer's conduct would be treated as seriously after the scene ended as it had been while Austin was being restrained.
Back at the station, the sergeant sat down with Dempsey in an interview room and asked him to walk through the events of the evening in order. Dempsey's account was still disjointed in a way the sergeant found difficult to explain as tiredness or stress. The sergeant looked at him carefully and made another decision.
He told Dempsey he needed to submit to a drug and alcohol test before the night was over. Dempsey did not object. The test was administered at the station, and the results would be processed and returned the following morning.
The drug test results came back the next day. The sergeant who reviewed them sat at his desk for a long moment before picking up the phone to call his captain.
The results confirmed that Russell Dempsey had been on duty the previous evening with a controlled prescription substance in his system at levels the report identified as consistent with active impairment at the time of the incident. The medication had not been disclosed to the department as required, and the dosage recorded in the report was associated with impaired judgment, distorted perception, and erratic decision-making. That finding did not explain away the bias captured in the encounter, and the investigation did not treat it as an excuse. Instead, it added another layer to the question of why Dempsey had been on active patrol at all and why earlier warning signs in his record had not triggered closer supervision.
The captain reviewed the test results alongside the body-camera footage. He watched the footage twice before saying anything to anyone.