12 days after that, the district attorney's office declined to file charges. No injury, no prosecutable offense, a knuckle brushing a hand for less than half a second on camera with no force and no mark. Unpleasant unquestionably chargeable, no. The letter Margarite got from her attorney was four sentences long, and it ended with the phrase, "No further action." She read it twice.
Then she sat down at her kitchen table and laughed until she cried. And then she just cried. And then she stopped. And she made a cup of tea and thought with total sincerity, with genuine relief, with the specific certainty of a woman who has just been told she has gotten away with something. It's over.
It was not over. It had not in any meaningful sense started. Byron Ferris took six weeks to make a phone call. He would have told you if you'd asked him at the time that he was simply busy. There was a parking structure in Fort Wayne with a drainage problem and a daughter applying to colleges and a roof that needed doing before winter.
What was actually happening was that Byron Ferris was 61 years old and had spent his entire professional life certifying that things would hold. And he could not stop thinking about 6 seconds in a gate area 8 months before that flight. He'd looked up. He'd seen a commotion. He'd looked back down.
That was the whole memory. It was worth nothing. He knew it was worth nothing. But he'd also signed a witness statement. And on that statement, there'd been a phone number.
And the number sat in his wallet on a folded card for 6 weeks while he told himself it wasn't a memory, it was a shape. On a Tuesday in November, he was sitting in his truck in a Home Depot parking lot with a coffee. And he thought, "I'm not the one who has to decide if it's worth anything. I'm the one who has to say it. He called the number.
He talked to a woman who took his information and put him through to a man named Terrence Okafor who listened for 4 minutes without interrupting. Mr. Ferris, I want to be honest with you, Terrence said. What you're describing is not evidence. A face at a distance 8 months ago in a different airport on a different carrier. I can't do anything with that.
I know. I'm not brushing you off. I want to be clear about that. I just don't want you to think this is going to become something. I know that too.