Scenario 2

Scenario 2: the minivan behind the tent

A Bintac M50 or similar .50 caliber pre-charged pneumatic gun in the minivan behind the tent, 5.9 m (19 ft) from Charlie and sighted remotely with the Sony A7 mounted overhead.

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The account

This scenario is a study by Jason Goodman, not a claim made by any party to the case. It asks whether the shot could have come from close range behind the tent: a .50 caliber pre-charged pneumatic gun, modelled as a Bintac M50, fired from the open rear of the minivan parked in the tunnel and sighted remotely with the Sony A7 camera mounted overhead.

It starts from the Not Sameer Massey video. In the three frames just before the shot, a small dot appears in a different place in each frame.

What the model shows

From the minivan’s rear opening to Charlie’s neck the model measures 5.9 m (19 ft), and that path is clear.

From the tunnel itself there is no line to the neck: the back wall of the tent is in the way. The line exists only from the minivan’s rear opening.

The 3D model seen through the Not Sameer Massey phone, matched to his last frame before the shot. Compare it with the still from the video below.

What the video shows

The Not Sameer Massey video, hosted on Odysee. The three dots are in the frames just before the shot. The still is from the video itself, a few seconds earlier.

The three dots are placed in the model along the lines of sight from the phone. The straight line that fits them best passes about 6 cm above the minivan’s rear opening.

One camera cannot say how far away each dot was, only its direction. So the video alone cannot show where the dots came from.

Taken in frame order, the dots move away from Charlie, not toward him. Placed on the minivan path they are 1.8 m apart in total, which at the video’s frame rate is about 177 ft/s. For the dots to be a projectile travelling toward Charlie at air-gun speed, the phone’s HDR processing would have to combine and reorder exposures in a way that is not documented.

The dots are not a video-compression artefact: they are absent from the reference frames the compressed frames are built from. A small real object close to the phone is another possible explanation. Neither explanation is established.

The minivan’s rear door does open. It can be seen opening at about 7 minutes 10 seconds into the video below.