Mercer was interviewed through the procedures available to him.
Bennett was interviewed separately.
Lieutenant Halden provided a statement.
The woman who had recorded part of the encounter, a shopping-center employee named Nora Ellis, submitted her video after investigators arranged to obtain and preserve it properly.
Nora's recording began moments before the first baton strike.
It wasn't perfect.
She had been standing some distance away.
A passing vehicle briefly blocked her view.
But the recording showed my hands visible through the driver's-side window and captured Mercer's first strike.
It also recorded Bennett shouting for him to stop.
The deputy's body camera provided a clearer perspective on several crucial moments, including the discussion about the vehicle registration and the search.
The initial review revealed something important.
There was no documented traffic violation supporting Mercer's later description of the stop.
His report claimed that my vehicle had been moving unusually slowly and that he believed the driver might be impaired.
But the available recordings showed no clear driving behavior consistent with the narrative he supplied, and he hadn't mentioned suspected impairment when he first approached.
Instead, he asked about the car's ownership, my clothing, my destination, and the contents of the trunk.
Those questions were not unlawful simply because he asked them.
But they mattered when the investigators tried to determine why the stop occurred and whether the escalation was justified.
A more troubling discrepancy emerged from the use-of-force report.
Mercer wrote that I "refused repeated orders to exit the vehicle and made sudden movements toward the passenger compartment."
The recordings told a different story.
They showed me explaining that I would unbuckle and step out.
They showed Mercer ordering me not to move while simultaneously demanding that I exit.
And they showed no visible movement suggesting I was reaching for a weapon or threatening him.
The investigators were careful not to announce their conclusions immediately.
They continued gathering evidence.
But the contradictions were significant enough that the sheriff extended Mercer's removal from field duty pending the process.
For the first time, the incident wasn't merely a complaint by one driver against one officer.
It was a documented disagreement between an officer's official account and independent evidence.
Lieutenant Halden was called back for a second interview.
The investigators wanted to know why his preliminary summary used language closely matching Mercer's account despite Bennett's immediate statement that he hadn't observed a threat justifying the window break.
Halden said he had been working with incomplete information.
He explained that he arrived after the use of force and relied partly on Mercer's account while organizing the scene.