Then he waited. The appeal process had a lengthy timeline under state law. Wendell did not intend to wait 60 days, but the appeal served a purpose that had nothing to do with his outcome. It created a record, a documented timestamp record showing that the Collier Ridge precinct had been asked for public records, had partially complied, had withheld material, and had been formally challenged on the withholding.
In any future proceeding, federal or state, that record would demonstrate a pattern of non-ooperation. and patterns in Wendell's experience were worth more than any single piece of evidence. While the appeal was pending, Micah continued his route. Tull had pulled back as Granger ordered. The patrol car no longer appeared on Windham Lane at dawn.
The stops had stopped, but the calls had not. Ashford continued filing reports, not with 911 now, but through the non-emergency line and not about Micah directly, but about unfamiliar vehicles and unknown individuals near the subdivision. The language had shifted. The intent had not.
And then 3 weeks after Wendell filed the appeal, something arrived that changed the trajectory of everything. It came not through the state records process, but through a different channel entirely. A courier delivered a sealed envelope to a post office box that was not registered under Wendell's name at a location that was not near Maynard Street and the return address was a suite number at a federal building in Washington DC. Inside was a USB drive.
On the USB drive were four video files, body camera footage, Tull's camera, dates matching Micah's fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh stops. Wendell watched all four files on his encrypted laptop. Wearing earbuds in the parked sedan at a location he chose for its distance from the house and its lack of security cameras. He watched each file twice.
He took notes in a leather-bound notebook that had no name on its cover, no label on its spine, and no identifying marks of any kind. The footage confirmed what Micah's recordings had already documented, but it added a dimension that audio alone could not provide. In the fourth stop, Tull's camera captured him approaching Micah from behind, closing the distance to less than eighteen inches before speaking. In the fifth stop, the camera captured Briggs arriving, examining the delivery manifest, and then leaning close to Tull to say something off-axis.
The camera's microphone positioned on Tull's chest caught only fragments, but three words were audible, compressed by the microphone's proximity to Tull's own breathing. Clean it up. The sixth stop was the one where Tull grabbed the satchel. The camera's angle, as Wendell had anticipated, captured the strap catching Micah's ear and the boy's wince.
It also captured the moment Tull upended the bag, the newspaper scattering, the voice recorder hitting the concrete and bouncing once before settling face up, its red recording light visible. The seventh stop, the most recent one, was the one where Tull placed his hand on Micah's shoulder. On camera, the gesture looked almost paternal. That was the danger of body cameras.