By Sunday afternoon, the twenty-two seconds were everywhere.
A guest from the wedding reception, a dental hygienist from Midlothian named Brooke Tillery, had been standing under the porte-cochère when the sound came around the corner, and she had done what people do now: she had lifted her phone. Her video began after the slam. It showed, from forty feet away and through the bars of the side-lot fence, a uniformed officer leaning his full weight on a handcuffed man in a tuxedo who was bent over the hood of a dark car. It showed a valet in a red vest shouting, "He owns it! I gave him the key!" It showed the officer pointing and the valet going down onto the brick with his hands behind his head. It showed, very briefly and very blurry, the man on the hood turning his face toward the camera, and in that second, if you knew him, you could tell who he was.
By Sunday evening, a great many people in Richmond knew who he was.
The Richmond Police Department released a statement at 6:00 p.m. It said that an officer working secondary employment at a downtown hotel had "responded to information from a member of the public regarding a possible vehicle theft in progress," that the subject "failed to comply with lawful commands and physically resisted," that a second individual "interfered with the officer's efforts to secure the scene," and that both men had been charged. It said the department "takes all use-of-force incidents seriously" and that the officer had been placed on administrative duty "per standard protocol pending review." It did not name the officer. It did not name Julian.
It did not have to. The Times-Dispatch had his name by seven, and his photograph, the one from the Commission hearing in the spring, standing at a lectern with his drawings, by seven-fifteen. By eight, someone had put the hearing photograph side by side with a still from Brooke Tillery's video, the same man in the same reading glasses, now pinned face-down to metal, and that image had been shared eleven thousand times.
The Reverend Dr. Lorraine Battle had been pastor of Second Street Bethel Baptist in Jackson Ward for twenty-two years. Her church stood three blocks from where Amos Ashby had laid brick, and she had buried Amos Ashby in 1998, and she had baptized Naomi. On Sunday night she called Delphine Okafor.
"What do you need?"
"Bodies," Delphine said. "Tomorrow morning. The Justice Center, Fairfield Way. The valet is going to be arraigned on video at nine, and if the judge releases him, he walks out the release door around ten or eleven. The Sheriff's office doesn't hold people on ICE detainers without a judicial warrant. That's their policy, and the Sheriff's a decent man, and he'll follow it. But they'll still let ICE know when he's getting out. And if there's nobody standing outside that door but his lawyer, there's a real chance that a gray SUV pulls up and he's in Farmville by lunch."
"How many bodies?"
"As many as you can find who'll stand on a sidewalk in the cold and not get themselves arrested."
"Honey," said Lorraine Battle, "I have been finding those since 1987."