He would describe the tightness later in a sworn affidavit using the specific language of the department's use of restraint policy. Restraints were applied beyond the manufacturer's recommended tension, resulting in visible contusion and restricted circulation to the left hand. But that was later. Now he just felt the metal and he was quiet. Ror moved to Das.
Same procedure. Turn around, hands behind your back. Click, click. Two notches pass snug. "These are too tight," Daria said.
"They're fine," Ror answered. "I'm telling you, they're too tight. I want that. " Noted. Noted.
He didn't adjust them. At 2:24 p.m., both men were handcuffed, standing on the south plaza of the Wakefield County Courthouse in full view of the posted public access notice sign. Three deputies and a sergeant stood around them. Two body cams were recording. Rors and Keats's one was not Nolan's manually disabled three minutes earlier and then Keats made a decision that would later become the centerpiece of the federal case.
Move them to the service corridor, he said. East side will finish the interview there. The service corridor. East side. Malcolm knew what that meant.
In 11 weeks of surveillance, he had documented the layout of every corridor, every entrance, every camera angle in and around the Wakefield County Courthouse. The service corridor on the east side was a 30-foot concrete passage between the courthouse loading dock and the employee parking structure. It had one overhead light, a sodium vapor fixture that hadn't been replaced in 2 years and cast more shadow than illumination. It had one security camera, a fixed angle unit mounted above the loading dock door, pointing away from the corridor, covering only the dock itself. The corridor was effectively a blind spot, and the deputies knew it.
In the 11 weeks of FBI surveillance, Malcolm and his team had identified this corridor as a recurring location. Seven encounters. Seven times deputies had moved subjects from the plaza or the parking lot into that corridor. Seven times the body cam footage either went dark, was corrupted, or showed only the walk into the corridor and the walk out. Never what happened in between.
That was why the FBI had installed two covert cameras in the corridor 3 weeks ago. One was mounted inside a junction box on the east wall, a fiber optic pinhole lens hardwired to a recording unit concealed in the maintenance closet 14 ft away. The other was embedded in the housing of a deactivated emergency light above the corridor's south entrance, a wireless unit transmitting encrypted footage to a mobile receiving station in a van parked on Collier Street two blocks north. Both cameras activated on motion detection. Both had infrared capability.
Both were recording now. Malcolm knew this. Duras knew this. And as they were walked, not dragged, not pushed, just walked with Ror's hand on Malcolm's shoulder and Nolan's hand on Das's arm from the plaza into the loading dock area and then into the service corridor. Malcolm felt something that he had felt before in undercover operations.