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.