Malik did not ride his bicycle. Not because Marcus told him not to, because Malik had looked at the bike in the garage every morning since the incident and had not been able to make his hands grip the handlebars without feeling the memory of the metal behind his wrists. Marcus noticed. He did not mention it. He waited.
On the 14th day, Phelps returned, not to the house, to the street. He parked the cruiser at the corner of Brierfield Lane in Sycamore Court, the same intersection where the incident had occurred, and sat there for 47 minutes with the engine running. He was not responding to a call. The dispatch log for that afternoon, later obtained through the same open records request Marcus had filed, showed no active calls in the Ridge Haven area between 2 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. Phelps was there on his own time in his assigned vehicle, parked on a public street within direct line of sight of 62 Brierfield Lane. Malik saw the cruiser from his bedroom window.
He did not tell his mother. He went downstairs and told his father. Marcus walked to the front window, looked through the curtain, and saw the car. He picked up his phone. He opened the camera.
He took seven photographs, each timestamped, each showing the cruiser's unit number, license plate, and position relative to the house. Then he called the non-emergency police line and reported a suspicious vehicle parked on a residential street for an extended period. The dispatcher paused. "Sir, that vehicle is a department unit." "I understand.
I am reporting that a department unit is parked on my residential street with no active call in this area. I am requesting this report be logged and timestamped." The dispatcher logged it. Call reference number 77734. Phelps left 11 minutes later.
He came back 3 days after that. Same corner, same engine running, this time for 29 minutes. Marcus photographed it again, called the non-emergency line again, logged it again. On the third visit, a Thursday, 4:31 p.m., while Malik was doing homework at the kitchen table and trying not to look out the window, Phelps got out of the cruiser. He walked across the street to the Thompson's mailbox.
He stood there for 6 seconds. He did not touch the mailbox. He did not place anything inside. He just stood there looking at the house, looking at the front door, and then he turned and walked back to his cruiser and drove away. The Ring camera at 60 Brierfield Lane, the neighbor's house, two doors down, captured the entire sequence in 143 seconds of uninterrupted footage.