They weren't attacking the evidence. They couldn't. The evidence was solid, and everyone knew it. They were attacking his right to use it at all.
The oversight board convened the following Thursday morning in a small hearing room at City Hall. Five appointed members sat behind a long table, with Francis in the front row alongside Roxanne and a stack of files thick enough to answer any question they might ask. For nearly two hours, the board reviewed everything Francis's office had assembled. The engineer's report.
The recovered body-cam footage. The pattern of three prior complaints tied to Garvey's unit. The timeline of the raid itself, laid out minute by minute. Board members asked pointed questions.
A few pushed back. But by the time the discussion wound down, the weight of the evidence was hard to argue with. At 11:40, the board voted four to one to move forward with formal criminal charges against Captain Roger Garvey for property destruction and civil-rights violations. Francis felt something in his chest finally loosen.
Weeks of pressure. Smear articles. Sleepless nights in a borrowed guest room. Here it was.
A real vote. A real step toward accountability. He allowed himself, for just a moment, to believe it might actually be over. It lasted less than 20 minutes.
Before the board could formally close the session, one of Mayor Howard's appointees raised a procedural motion. The unresolved conflict-of-interest complaint filed against Francis the week before, she argued, needed to be addressed before the case could proceed any further under his office's direction. Until that complaint was resolved, she said, the case should be reassigned to a special prosecutor to avoid any appearance of bias. Francis stood ready to object.
But the board chair was already nodding along. It sounded reasonable. It sounded fair. That was exactly the problem.
The motion passed three to two. By that afternoon, the case that had started on Francis's own front lawn was formally reassigned to a special prosecutor named Gerald Archer, a man with a long, quiet history of ties to the police union. Francis knew him by reputation. He was someone who closed cases fast and closed them quietly.
It got worse before the day was over. Garvey's attorneys, watching the reassignment happen in real time, filed their own motion within hours, arguing that Francis should be barred from providing any testimony in the case at all, given his position as both victim and the official who directed the original investigation. It was a bold move, almost insulting in how transparent it was. Francis understood exactly what it was built to do.
Box him out of the one case that mattered most to him, using the very evidence he'd fought to expose as the excuse to silence him. Officer Oliver, the one witness who could speak directly to what happened inside that house, still hadn't answered a single call in over a week. By evening, Francis sat in his car outside the still-condemned house on Somerset Court. The engine was off.