Mike Sutton — Direct/Cross/Redirect/Recross/Voir Dire

MIKE SUTTON: Mike Sutton. S-u-t-t-o-n.

MIKE SUTTON: I'm a forensic engineer.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, the majority of the work that I do involves the investigation of accidents and failures in the field of legal questions, legal problems, court of law. So, what forensic engineers do is they collect data, collect physical evidence, they interpret the data, and then try to come up with what happened in an event, maybe what didn't happen in an event. Or maybe you try to limit the possibilities of what happened in an event.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, I was born in Hickory, North Carolina. Then I grew up in Cary. When I was young, my family moved to Cary, which is right outside of Raleigh. When I graduated from Cary High School, I went to North Carolina State University. And I was in the Materials Engineering Department for about a year, and my sophomore year I transferred over to the Mechanical Engineering Department. And so I was at NC State for my undergraduate from '84 to '88. And when I was a sophomore, I met an engineer whose name is Dr. Charles Manning who owns a company still in Raleigh. He's passed away but his company is still there. And Dr. Manning was an ex-professor at State. He's also an ex-NASA engineer. And I worked with him from basically 1987. Then after I graduated, I went full-time with him.

MIKE SUTTON: In mechanical engineering and --

MIKE SUTTON: Working with him, and I continued to work with him. And then I got a Master's Degree at North Carolina State University, also in mechanical engineering with a concentration in acoustics and vibrations.

MIKE SUTTON: Correct.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, I worked with him as a consulting engineering -- consulting forensic engineer looking at all different kinds of accidents and failures, about anything that you can imagine. We do a lot of motor accidents, of course, because there's so many. We look at structural failures, product failures, material failures, about anything that you can imagine basically. If there's anything that is based in physics, it's capable of being explained and understood.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, physics is -- are the laws that govern how things around us, how they behave. You can predict the behavior. You know, if I drop a basketball off of a balcony, I can predict how long it's going to take to reach the ground based on all of the different variables. So, the laws of physics are there. That helps us figure out how things would have happened. So, I worked with Dr. Manning for awhile until 2000, the end of 2000. And in 2001 I founded my current company, which is based in Cary. It's call Accident Research Specialists, and we do --

MIKE SUTTON: Accident Research Specialists in Cary, North Carolina, and we do the same thing. There are ten engineers that I work with and support staff, and we investigate, analyze a variety of cases for a variety of clients. Like I said, most of my work is related to either criminal cases or civil cases, and I do some consulting that's not related to courtroom issues, just straight consulting to companies.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes, I have.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, the shooting incident reconstruction, at least how I'm involved with it, I deal with what would be with called external ballistics and terminal ballistics. So, external ballistics are the flight of a bullet after it leaves the gun. A bullet leaving the barrel of a gun, it's going to be affected upon by gravity, air resistance, so that's just physics. And then there's terminal ballistics, which is what happens to a projectile when it strikes the target or an object.

MIKE SUTTON: I would say over the years maybe fifty, and all different kinds. Like, for instance, it could be a case where a manufacturer is being sued for, like, a drop fire where somebody dropped a pistol and it went off and killed them.

MIKE SUTTON: No, and so it could be a products case. I've worked on cases involving hunters, you know, long range distance shots where you're trying to figure out where a particular hunter was aiming the gun so he -- where he hit and killed somebody. I've worked certainly in law enforcement shootings. I've worked for law enforcement, and I've worked on the side opposite law enforcement for people who have been shot by law enforcement. I worked on insurance cases. Sometimes there's a question about whether it was a suicide or an accident. So, those are the types of cases that I would be involved with.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, crime scene reconstructionist would be looking at a lot of different things. I'm a mechanical engineer. I deal with physics, but somebody who works a crime scene may have also a background in chemistry, and they may be using different reagents to find blood or gunshot residue. That's not what I do, but I physically reconstruct a site. One of the main things that we do in forensic engineering, such as myself, accident reconstruction, is what it is, is that we have the ability to go and capture data, collect facts from a site, whether it's an accident or a murder or what have you. And then what we do is we interpret what we're finding and try to, again, put ourselves in a position to answer questions about how an event occurred, or maybe limit what could have occurred, or maybe what didn't occur.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: That was in federal court.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: That is correct.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes. I have testified in other criminal trials where the questions were, just as I said -- which is where was the weapon aimed, maybe how many shots were fired, where were the shots fired from, maybe the sequence of shots. Again, this is all, you know, developing and understanding of what the physical evidence tells you.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, acoustics and vibrations, or acoustics specifically, is part of mechanical engineering. It's the study of how sound moves, how it's made, how it may be -- how a sound may decrease over distance, the effect of sound on people. It's obviously something real important because if you're exposed to sound for long periods of time, you can lose part of your hearing. So, it is a subset of mechanical engineering. And so I have testified in cases involving acoustics. And my Master's paper was in the area of something that I do quite often, which is audibility of emergency vehicles. Like if the police car has a siren on and you're driving up to an intersection and you've have got the radio on, can you hear the siren or can you not hear the siren? Maybe it makes a difference if your window is up or down, those types of issues. So, the audibility of noise.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes. Often with acoustics, you can definitely look at it theoretically, but I typically test it because it's something that is readily testable.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: They are.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: It is. Motor vehicle accidents, and again it's just because there are so many of them. Throughout my career of thirty-six years, I've looked at probably a couple thousand motor vehicle wrecks.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes, it is.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: I can speak to that generally.

MIKE SUTTON: So, I think I mentioned it earlier, but really the first steps in any investigation, if it's a little investigation, big investigation, my job and the people I work with and people in other companies that do what we do, you go collect facts. And in this case this is -- and this is typical. Facts were collected. The crime scene was processed. There were a lot of pictures taken, things like that, by SLED, so that's one place that I can get facts. I typically do -- and I did in this case -- I go collect facts myself, so I went to Moselle. And it had changed. I went there about eighteen months after the murders. I went in October of '22, but I was able to measure the Moselle property and look at the physical evidence, what was remaining, and then I was able to use that in conjunction with what SLED had done because SLED had collected a lot of evidence at the scene that I looked at.

MIKE SUTTON: That is correct.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: She did.

MIKE SUTTON: They were. It was what I was looking at, at least to my role in look at the crime scene or the site of the crime, the questions that I was being asked.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: So, this is what I call the quail pen, and it's a small animal cage it's been referred to, but it's a bird cage. And it's up against the building, or the barn, or the hangar. I think it's been called several things. It's up underneath the roof.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes, and this particular photograph was taken the night of the murders. So, the first few pictures just show the points of evidence that were of interest to me. And then what happened later on, it was the next month -- I believe was July the 6th -- Special Agent Worley went back and actually took some measurements. It's -- she used basically a common technique where you try to get more information about these bullet holes.

MIKE SUTTON: It's a little bit closer view of the quail pen. And what you have there on the side of the quail pens, it would be the side that's really facing the crime scene.

MIKE SUTTON: It's made out of like a fiberboard, a little bit more robust than cardboard. It's like a fiberboard so you can penetrate is easily, and there was a bullet hole basically in the center of it.

MIKE SUTTON: That is the bullet hole. And if you were able to zoom in a little bit and look carefully, you would be able to see what's called a bullet wipe. It's down -- it's -- you know, if that was a tiny little clock, it would be just under 3:00. And so when I looked at that, it looked like the bullet was on an upward trajectory, a small one but an upward trajectory. And what the bullet wipe is, is when the bullet comes out of the barrel of the gun, it's going to have products of the bullet being fired. And when it enters sheetrock, or a car door, or a piece of plywood, you commonly see that lead-in mark where the bullet goes into a piece of the material.

MIKE SUTTON: So, when you look at the entry -- the entrance of a bullet hole into a surface like this, and this is the piece of gray cardboard. There's some tearing here, but if you look here in the side, that's what's called the bullet wipe mark, and that shows you the direction that it's coming from. So, it's coming from where I'm standing. And it's a little bit below -- like if you could draw a straight line through there, that would be even with the horizon. It's a little bit below that. So, right away that told me that this bullet, when it penetrated this piece of material here, that it was traveling upwards and from right to left.

MIKE SUTTON: This is a photograph from Special Agent Worley's trip to the crime scene. I think it was the next month, July the 6th.

MIKE SUTTON: So, this, this bullet, it penetrates this quail pen and actually goes through the wall of the hangar, too. It goes through several layers of material. And a common technique to try to figure out why is the angle of that shot, you take something like this. Typically they're fiberglass so they don't bend. They're perfectly straight, and you insert that rod through the bullet hole, and then what you do is you measure this rod. So, right now she's measuring what's called the vertical angle. So, if I was measuring this -- the angle of the shot to the TV right here, so vertical angle is this way. Was the bullet going up? Or was it going down? Or was it going straight in?

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Correct.

MIKE SUTTON: It was going up.

MIKE SUTTON: So, the bullet was traveling upwards, which is consistent with what I just showed you on the previous pictures. So, her measurement that's going up is consistent. She recorded in her notes that that was 3 degrees going up, so pretty flat. But the bullet was traveling upwards. But there are two pictures. She has one picture of it at 3 degrees, and one at 1 and a half degrees. So, pretty close but two different trajectories. And later on I looked at the difference between the 1 and a half and the 3.

MIKE SUTTON: And we can -- that will come up later. But for the purposes of me understanding what was going on here, I considered both 1 and a half and 3.

MIKE SUTTON: Okay. Well, the reason this is interesting is because it's an upward traveling bullet. So, if you think about the path of this bullet for all purposes here, because we're talking about maybe 50 feet in this crime scene, it's not 400 yards. If it's 400 yards, the bullet has a curved trajectory. So here, because the area that we're considering is so small that, for all intents and purposes, it's a flat trajectory, which means that the barrel of the gun was on the same angle as that rod. Okay? And it's going down, which means if you extend that rod -- if you're able to extend that rod some distance, it's going to go into the ground. So, if it goes in the ground -- obviously the gun can't be underground. So, you know that the shooter who fired the weapon that sent the bullet in the quail pen has to be on that line. So, the weapon has to be on that line, and it's going to go into the ground at some point. So, that is a good piece of information because that locks the location of the shooter at least for one shot.

MIKE SUTTON: This was the 300 Blackout.

MIKE SUTTON: This is just another measurement. This may be the one that's pushed 1 and a half degrees, but you can see this is called -- they call it trajectory rods, which again is inserted through the multiple paths of the bullet as it went through things.

MIKE SUTTON: Correct.

MIKE SUTTON: Same thing. I'm just showing the -- kind of the different -- the different readings that she got here. It was within the range.

MIKE SUTTON: So, the same answer for these.

MIKE SUTTON: This will explain a little bit better.

MIKE SUTTON: This is to show the trajectory rod. It comes in. We've been look at this side right here, but if you look inside, you see it kind of goes through the cage, and it goes through the back of the cage, and it actually goes into the hangar of the barn. It goes through the siding and then the plywood.

MIKE SUTTON: That's the inside. I was just trying to show the technique, and this technique is a technique that is used often. There are other ways to do it, and you may talk about it later, but this is a technique that's often used to come up with this line of fire, or the path that that bullet took, because if you consider the path of the bullet, you may be able to conclude something.

MIKE SUTTON: It's just more of the same. This is the trajectory rod inside the cage of the quail pen.

MIKE SUTTON: More of the same.

MIKE SUTTON: More of the same.

MIKE SUTTON: That's correct.

MIKE SUTTON: That's correct.

MIKE SUTTON: This is called a zero edge protractor. So, the protractor is going to measures 0 to 180 degrees. So, this is -- Special Agent Worley puts it up against the side of the quail pen and drop a thumba down so you can get what's called the azimuth. An azimuth is just your compass direction. So -- because without the azimuth -- and this is about 41 degrees coming in from where I'm standing. So, you know, 45 degrees would be here. There's 41 degrees. 90 degrees would be straight in. So, what that does is it tells you the direction of this line.

MIKE SUTTON: That's correct.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, it's coming from over here to the right.

MIKE SUTTON: And then to determine exactly how, you need to go back and kind of look. You have to do it to scale, of course, right?

MIKE SUTTON: So, you have to create a scale diagram, or do what we typically do, which is we scan.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes, and you can see here that it's 41 degrees.

MIKE SUTTON: And that's what she recorded in the notes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: So, the dog house had a bullet hole in it. It was pretty low to the ground. It was about 5 and a half inches above the ground, 3 inches up from the bottom of the siding on the dog house, and this bullet hole was going downwards, 14 degrees down, and it had an angle slightly to the left. And so kind of the same way that you can think about the one that was going up, you think about the one that's going down. So, if you put a trajectory rod, and you'll see that in a second, it's going to be sticking upwards like that, so you can go up that trajectory rod to a point where it makes no sense. Like the shooter would have to be on a ladder, right? So, what that does is it tells you where that shot came from, and it puts a limit on where that shooter could be. You know, just the same way that the shot trajectory would disappear into the ground makes no sense. You know, shot trajectory that's up to 10 feet doesn't make any difference either -- I mean, doesn't make any sense.

MIKE SUTTON: That is the 300 Blackout projectile. It went into the dog house, went into a dog bed, so you're able to dig it out, so you can see that here. So, again, these are the night of the murders.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, in this particular case the siding was thick enough where Agent Worley was able to put a dowel rod, or a trajectory rod into that hole unlike the quail pen, which is very thin. So, a very thin material is considered thin if the thickness of that material is much less than the length of the bullet.

MIKE SUTTON: So, in a thin material -- there's some special considerations with thin materials versus thick materials, but the dog house had siding and wood construction, so it's thicker. So, a thick materials is going to be more in line with the length of the bullet and even longer. So, you can still get the trajectory with reasonable accuracy in this particular case.

MIKE SUTTON: This is the same process here, the dog house where --

MIKE SUTTON: This is the trajectory rod. This is a dial protractor. It just uses gravity to tell you what the angle is.

MIKE SUTTON: 14 degrees down.

MIKE SUTTON: That's correct.

MIKE SUTTON: Zoomed in so you can see. So, there's 90, and it's over at about 76 degrees or so.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Azimuth. So, if this is -- this shows you the compass direction of the shot, where it's coming from, and here it's -- she measured 7 degrees, she recorded 6 degrees off of there, but it's somewhere in there. All you really got to know, it's not straight into the dog house. It's a little bit of an angle, about 6 or 7 degrees.

MIKE SUTTON: Yeah, so there's 90. So, the thumba would be right here if it was going straight into the dog house, but it's a little bit to the left.

MIKE SUTTON: 6 or 7 degrees.

MIKE SUTTON: So, this is Agent Worley's diagram, and it's not to scale. And these are just the lines that I drew in to begin with, you know, before I really did much work in the case. And it's clearly not to scale because, for instance, from the small animal cage, that pole is 24 feet, about, and you can see that Maggie's body is, you know, 17 feet long. You know, it's -- but it says not to scale. But what that doesn't do for you, it really doesn't tell you, okay, we went through all of that trouble and measured these, and what does it tell you? And what I noticed was this, is that there was two shots, and one was into the dog house, which was facing this way, and one was into the quail pen, which is, like, facing the way this desk here -- that's two totally different directions. So, the first thing that would be good to do is to draw those lines backwards and see where they cross, right? And where they can cross, is there anything of interest there, right? Are they footprints or something? In this case there was, but -- not footprints. But that's what you do here. And so the thing you're looking at is, is let's figure out what this is telling us, which it is these two lines are going to cross somewhere.

MIKE SUTTON: It doesn't really tell us much because they don't cross at the right spot.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: I can stay up there.

MIKE SUTTON: This is a AVI file.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, I can explain --

MIKE SUTTON: It is a video.

MIKE SUTTON: Yeah. So, the quail pen is against this wall.

MIKE SUTTON: Here is the quail pen.

MIKE SUTTON: The dog house is right here.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes, sir.

MIKE SUTTON: That's correct.

MIKE SUTTON: It is to scale. It's very accurate. It's kind of the modern way to measure a site. It's -- scanning is used all over now, from dentist offices to everything, but --

MIKE SUTTON: I did.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: That is correct.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes. In the scan, you can just cut the roof of. It just makes things easier to see. The roof -- the roof was of no importance to me.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, this is where I start constructing some lines. And this is just an overall shot looking straight down. Like this is a bird's eye view of the scan, and the dog kennels are in the bottom right, and the hangar, the barn is kind of the center top of the picture. And it's just -- there's nothing really, you know, of this particular shot. It just illustrates what you can do and what I did. For instance is I drew some white lines in there. Those are measurement bars. One is 25 feet long, one is 50 feet long, but the scan itself, you can measure very accurately anywhere in the scan because this is not a picture. What it is are the points. And there's so many points, there's millions of points, and there's so many points when you put them together it actually looks like an object, like a three dimensional object.

MIKE SUTTON: It's a -- we call them FARO scan. FARO is the company that builds the scanner. There are other companies like Nikon that make scanners, but a FARO scan is a laser scanner. And what it does is it sends out a laser and when that laser hits an object, it returns back to the scanner. It gets reflected back. Depending on how much time that takes, it can figure out how far away that object is, and we're talking about a very small point. And then what it does is it -- because the scanner is spinning around this way and a mirror is spinning this way, it knows where that point is in space. And then what it also does to make it look better, it spins the camera around, and then the camera applies more information on these points, so what you end up with are millions of points. Like if you scan the front yard of this courthouse you would get trees, you would get signs, you would get people kind of ghosting by as they walk through the scan, so it just picks up everything.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes. They did do a FARO scan. I have seen their fly through like we just showed you, but that's the only thing that I've seen. So, they did -- and, again, it is a common technique people in our field use to measure things because you don't have to take 100 measurements with a tape measure, and it's much more accurate.

MIKE SUTTON: They did.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: I would have to compare them, but it should -- it should basically be the same thing. Their scan and our scan should be the same because it's a highly precise instrument, and --

MIKE SUTTON: -- the only difference would be they did it in July.

MIKE SUTTON: October of '22.

MIKE SUTTON: So, the next thing I wanted to do, other than reconstruct the shot trajectories like we said before, I wanted to know where the evidence markers were. So, what this here is, I took Special Agent Worley's measurements. She had measured to a bunch of different things, including the head and feet of the victims, and then also to those little yellow evidence marker tags. And the evidence markers that I was most interested in were numbers two through seven, which would have been the empty cartridge cases from the 300 Blackout. But what I did was is I created a CAD diagram to scale of Agent Worley's measurements.

MIKE SUTTON: It's a -- it's just computer aided drawing. It's a drawing package so you can do a scale diagram. Now, she did this just, you know, measuring from a pole or post and whatnot. But we have a technique -- when we scanned in '22, obviously these markers were not there, but we had lots of photographs of them. And so there's a methodology that we can use to where we can flatten the picture taken the night of the murders, and then we can match that to the scan, so then once you match that photograph to the scan, you can actually place in objects that no longer exist very accurately.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes. So, this is Special Agent Worley's hand measurements.

MIKE SUTTON: Put on a computer program. And because I wanted to put the evidence markers in my scan, and so you can -- you would have the scan of the Moselle property, but then I can put stuff in there, too. I could put a car in there, I could put a body, or I could put these evidence markers. So, I used this to check what we did was -- which we used photographs and the techniques of putting the evidence markers where they belong.

MIKE SUTTON: So, what this is, is then I overlaid Agent Worley's drawing, the one that we just looked at, over my scan. And I used that -- if you were able to zoom in a little bit, I don't know if it's how -- it may be a little bit hard for you guys to see, but those circles with the crosses in them are Special Agent Worley's measurements. And then either touching them or inside of them are the evidence markers that got placed by what we call a reverse camera projection, which is just a fancy name of we can take the information from a photograph taken the night of the murders, and we can attach that to our scan, and then if we want to we can put missing objects in there, which is what we did here.

MIKE SUTTON: There's an example of it there.

MIKE SUTTON: It shows the same thing. So, we use a reverse camera projection method to get the yellow evidence markers in the scan. And you can see there Special Agent Worley's measurements are usually right beside it, but you have to remember she was probably stretching a tape measure, so it all makes sense. So, it agreed. So, what that tells you, you have a high degree of confidence that these markers are in the correct place.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, it's a -- it is a video, if you want to show the whole screen.

MIKE SUTTON: So, this is fading back and forth between the scan world, or the computer world, and reality. So, you can see there that that's a crime scene photo that was taken the night of the murders. And what that is doing is it's showing you the comparison between this world that we built to try to understand what was the physical evidence telling us.

MIKE SUTTON: No, it's a complete picture. You know, they -- some items may have been moved by the time this picture was taken. I would have to go back and see exactly when it was taken.

MIKE SUTTON: Oh, no, no. This is the night of the murders here.

MIKE SUTTON: Okay. So, I picked a place in the scan to start laying in those lines. So, now we've talked about how we built this up, so let's put the trajectory of the two shots that were measured and see what it tells us. And so I just chose a point. You're looking straight into the side of the dog house. The sheet in the foreground there would be Maggie's body. And then you can see the evidence markers. There's three, four, you can see five and six over by the sheet, and twelve is something else. I believe it was a -- it may have even been bullet fragments. But three, four, five, and six there are empty cartridge cases from the bullets that were fired.

MIKE SUTTON: That was probably one of -- one of my engineers, or somebody I work with, who was doing some other task.

MIKE SUTTON: So when you scan, if you stand still long enough, it will scan you.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: The two green lines are the shot trajectories into the quail pen.

MIKE SUTTON: Because one is at 1 and a half degrees up, and one is at 3 degrees up.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes. So, that is the flight path of the bullet somewhere along that line, and so it's just -- it's trigonometry. It's not any more complicated than that. I don't know it's too complicated for you, but it's just trigonometry.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, it -- the lines are put in by me on the computer program. And, again, there are the 1 and a half degrees, 3 degrees. The importance of them is, is that's where the barrel of the gun has to be perfectly in line with that -- with those two green lines. But right now without knowing anything else, you could slide that gun up and down that green line and it could be anywhere, right? So -- but you start looking at other pieces of evidence. And so what you would have is, is, well, what other pieces of evidence we have. I looked at this and I said, well, where does the shot trajectory go? Well, it goes almost right over Maggie's body, very close to it, right close to the feet. That's one thing. The second thing is, is there is a collection of empty cartridge cases right to the line. So, if I'm facing the quail pen, there is a collection of cartridge cases to my right.

MIKE SUTTON: Typically it should be to the right and to the back somewhat.

MIKE SUTTON: It depends, but -- so, that was a piece of information, which is, is that starts to -- as I said before, sometimes what you'll look -- not you're looking at what you can determine but maybe you can limit where something happens. So, you know, that is a point of interest. Well, you have a pile of cartridge cases that go right beside the shot trajectories. That's an important point.

MIKE SUTTON: So, that is a shooter that I constructed. And what this is, it's actually a scan of a person, so you can get scans of people. In this particular case, just for the purposes of this trial, I stripped all of the textures off this person, so there's no clothing, or hair, or skin color, anything like that. So, it's just more almost like a robotic looking figure. It is holding a 300 Blackout weapon, a model of one. And when I started examining those shot trajectories, a couple of things were apparent. One is that it would be really hard for anybody to be shooting that shot from the shoulder because remember: the shot is going up. But it's only 4 feet 2 off the ground.

MIKE SUTTON: Yeah, the entry point. It's only 4 feet 2 off the ground, and it's going up, which means that even if you're a fairly short person, to get that trajectory you would have to walk all the way up to the quail pen to get it to work. So, what I was seeing here is that the most likely way that that shot was made was from a low position, like shooting low on the hip. So, I took this scanned in person with a Blackout, and I pushed the gun down about as far as I could push it.

MIKE SUTTON: Well, eventually -- at some point you have to have your hand on the trigger and the gun. And so instead of having the person stand straight up, too, I just put them in a shooting position. I don't know what the position the shooter was, but this is a thought process. Okay, what is this telling us? So that's what I did here.

MIKE SUTTON: That's on the 1 and a half degree.

MIKE SUTTON: That is the exact same shooter, except that shooter has its barrel on the 3 degree line.

MIKE SUTTON: Correct.

MIKE SUTTON: So, those are the two. So, the shooter --

MIKE SUTTON: -- the shooter behind is the 1 and a half degree. The shooter in front is the 3 degree. So, that kind of gives the range of this person being able to make that shot. And so the -- to me, because of several different factors, it's much more likely that the angle into the quail pen was flatter than 3 degrees, which we talked about before. One of the main reasons is there's no shell casings over behind the dog house.

MIKE SUTTON: There's no shell casings anywhere close to that person.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes.

MIKE SUTTON: So, what I would say is, is that what I did for this purpose is instead of having it here, I put it down here about as low as I could go.

MIKE SUTTON: And within, like, a shooting stance, like a shooting position. You're not aiming, but -- at least you're not aiming in the traditional sense, but you're --

MIKE SUTTON: Right. So, I stretched that gun down until I could just still keep my hand like I was shooting a gun.

MIKE SUTTON: It's really hard to put a shoulder shot on that trajectory just because it's so low. Because even a small person, going like this 4-foot-2, even if you put the barrel on the quail pen, it would be above the hole. So, it just doesn't make any sense.

MIKE SUTTON: Yes. For a person of this height, this is, to me, because of its proximity or closeness to the empty shell casings.

MIKE SUTTON: The green line here is the shot trajectory into the dog house. And this is the same shooter again. And it looks like he's standing on the sheet there, but all of that would tell me, if this did occur, then the body was not there.