Following that June encounter, Robert contacted Teresa for help getting away from James for the night. The significance of Teresa's role would become more complicated later because she continued communicating closely with James and would eventually resist investigators' conclusions about her brother's injuries. For detectives, however, the earlier footage now showed a pattern that was increasingly difficult to ignore.
The investigator returned to James with those prior incidents in mind. He asked whether Robert had other close friends, romantic partners, or regular visitors. James said Robert essentially had no one besides him and a doctor. The detective pointed out the obvious problem: Robert lived in a very small social world, and he kept appearing with serious injuries.
"It's just you and him in that world," the detective told James. He said that from where he was sitting, the pattern suggested James had hit Robert at some point. James continued denying that he had ever assaulted him. He accused detectives of trying to create a story rather than simply searching for the truth.
James responded to the detective's reconstruction by accusing Robert of habitually playing the victim. He suggested the older police encounters proved more about Robert's personality than about any abuse, and he continued insisting that officers were interpreting fear where there was none. The detective kept returning to the same problem: Robert had very few people around him, yet police had repeatedly encountered him with visible injuries and explanations tied to arguments with James. James never provided another person who fit the pattern as well as he did.
A witness then directly contradicted that denial. She told investigators she had personally seen James strike Robert in the face during an argument and give him a black eye. She also described seeing James grab Robert and choke him when Robert would not stop arguing. She admitted that at the time she had chosen to mind her own business.
The same witness described James as intensely controlling. She said he had cameras throughout the residence and constantly used them to monitor Robert. According to her, James watched the camera feeds on his phone and rarely allowed Robert to be outside his control. What initially looked like ordinary home-security equipment now became one of the most important sources of evidence in the investigation.
While detectives continued gathering statements, they learned that Robert had died at the hospital. The case was no longer an investigation into serious assault alone. Detectives now had to determine whether the injuries that put Robert in the hospital had caused his death and, if so, who was responsible.
They next spoke with Teresa. She said the hospital had told her Robert suffered a heart attack along with kidney and liver failure. Teresa expressed sadness but also said there were many things about Robert's condition that she had not known. The detectives, however, had attended the autopsy and knew that the central medical finding was far more troubling.
By the time of the autopsy, investigators had moved beyond the question of whether Robert's condition could be explained by hunger, a fall, or ordinary medical decline. The injuries were physical, extensive, and concentrated in ways that demanded an explanation. Detectives also knew that the pattern of bruising they had seen in old bodycam footage looked disturbingly familiar when placed beside Robert's final injuries. The medical findings gave the earlier encounters a new and far more serious context.
When they confronted James again, they told him Robert had been badly assaulted. The autopsy showed multiple fractures to Robert's face, including breaks to his nose, cheekbone, the roof of his mouth, and the area around his left eye. According to the official information cited in the case, Robert's cause of death was blunt-force trauma injuries and his manner of death was ruled a homicide.
The detective tried to separate the idea of an impulsive strike from what the injuries actually suggested. He told James that caring for someone in Robert's condition could be frustrating and even acknowledged that people sometimes lose their temper. But the damage found at autopsy went far beyond a single angry moment. James responded by asking how a punch could cause injuries like that.
The detective agreed that the injuries appeared to involve far more than one punch. From his perspective, there was no reasonable explanation for another person inflicting that level of trauma. James insisted the conclusion was ridiculous. He continued claiming that he would never have done something like that to Robert.
Investigators also received a disturbing allegation involving an animal. A person who knew James claimed that after a dog failed to obey him, James tied the animal in a shower with almost no slack on the leash. According to the allegation, when James later returned, the dog was dead. The witness said that incident made it easy for her to believe James was capable of extreme violence toward a person as well.