[This post is part of a larger series of posts. See here for a fuller explanation.]
Previously: Part 2: The January 9, 2012 Hearing.
I replied, “I will continue to tell the truth about you.” And then he continued to leave and I decided to ask him a few more questions in the hope of getting an admission out of him, asking him why he didn’t call me to the stand that day, given that I was supposedly such a vital witness. I said to him at one point, “The truth is you didn’t want my testimony, you just wanted my identity.”
And he turned to me and in a flash of anger, he said, “And I got it!”
During this exchange we had moved out of the courtroom, and into the waiting area outside. Shortly after he said those words, he took about two steps back and with a smirk, he raised his iPad as though to use it. Here’s what I wrote about it in my criminal complaint against him, and it is the truth (I will embed it later):
On January 9, 2012, I was leaving court at the same time as Mr. Kimberlin when Mr. Kimberlin raised his iPad as though to use it. Knowing that Mr. Kimberlin had deep malice toward me and knowing his criminal history, I was afraid he was about to do harm to me so I took the device from him. Because of the malice he had toward me and his criminal record, I believe I had a reasonable fear of bodily harm in that situation, justifying the invocation of self-defense. Even so, I only used the minimum force necessary to protect myself from this perceived danger. Specifically, I snatched iPad from him (he offered no resistance) and kept it from him, without ever once making contact with his body. I did not strike his body with my own. I did not push him. I did not wrestle with him. I did not strike him with the iPad as he later alleges.
That was the judgment I made about his conduct when I had no time to think, when I had to make a snap decision. As I waited, holding the iPad away from him I had time to think and to replay the event in my mind. As I thought about it I realized that more than likely Mr. Kimberlin only attempted to take my picture. I concluded that it was unlikely that the device was a bomb because I believe Mr. Kimberlin is too much of a narcissist to ever risk his own life. Therefore when the sheriff’s deputies arrived at the scene, I stated my belief that Mr. Kimberlin had taken a picture of me. Mr. Kimberlin denied that this occurred. I asked the officers to inspect the iPad for photographs. I did not see them do this, but they represented that they did, and I trust their word. I asked to inspect it myself, but they refused this request.
So basically I took his iPad out of fear for my safety—he is a convicted bomber after all—and then held it away from him peacefully. Courtroom staff told me that they had called the sheriffs deputies. I don’t remember my precise words, but I urged them to do exactly that. And the deputies arrived shortly afterward. At that point I gave back the iPad (giving it to a deputy who passed it along to Kimberlin) and accused Kimberlin of attempting to photograph me, which is against the rules in the courthouse.
Since then, Brett Kimberlin has essentially claimed that I not only took the iPad but I beat him up while doing so, and he filed charges for assault based on that claim. He has at times claimed that I have “decked” him, that I punched him repeatedly, that I wrestled with him, that I pushed him, that courtroom staff had to separate us, that sheriff’s deputies had to separate us, that I kept coming at him repeatedly and they had to hold me back. I will show you in just one moment where he said all of that—all of the documents, transcripts, etc.—but there is one way Brett Kimberlin fatally miscalculated. It never occurred to the rocket scientist that there might be security cameras in the courthouse that captured the whole thing.
Well, either that or he knew this was a possibility and didn’t care.
The video itself takes a bit of introduction. It was recorded using ViconNet’s proprietary software and while apparently the camera feed to the main security station is continuous, the recording is not. Let me use the testimony of Lt. Col. Bruce Sherman, of the Sheriff’s office, to explain to some degree, taking his testimony from the April 11, 2012 hearing related to this:
Q [Reginald Bours III, my attorney] Tell me about the system that these photographs are taken with or these videos are taken with.
A [Lt. Col. Bruce Sherman] There’s a Vicon system that has a number of hard drives, maybe two or three hard drives. I’m not exactly sure about the electronics, but there is a rack in the Sheriff’s office on the T8 level in the courthouse that records video feeds from cameras that are installed in the courtrooms, installed in the hallways in the courthouse, pursuant to a security study done by the National Center for State Courts some years ago.
They typically -- some of them are fixed cameras. Some of them are directable cameras and they record what I would call multiplexed video. In other words, it’s not a continuous stream of photographs. There are maybe 16 cameras being recorded on one hard disc and it will switch from each of those 16 cameras, as I understand it, take a fraction of a second, switch to the next camera, and then it gets multiplexed. Then there’s a software kind of set up that allows it to separate those pictures out again.
So the video feed to their hard drives is continuous, but the recording is not. Instead it only takes a “snapshot” at certain intervals and the video is going to be a series of these snapshots, shown in order. Here’s a screenshot of the video, with some helpful arrows on it:
Of course you can see where I pointed out where I was, and where Kimberlin was (the easy way to remember is that I am about half a foot taller than Kimberlin). And notice that there is a time stamp at the bottom left of the screen. Each “snapshot” will tell you down to the second when it occurred. And by watching the intervals, I estimate that the actual gap between images is around 1.75 seconds; that is, there is about 1.75 seconds between each snapshot.
Finally, because this is extremely raw video, you need to wait a minute before anything happens at all. Or you could fast forward...
So without further ado, here is the video:
Feel free to watch it more than one time. Now whose version of events lines up more with what you just saw? Mine, where I say (as I have always said) that all I did was that I took the iPad from him and nothing else? Or his various accounts?
But in fact Kimberlin went a lot further than that. This convicted document forger went as far as to produce fake photographs and fake medical records in an attempt to convince law enforcement that I had so brutally beat him that I put him in the hospital.* In short, he attempted to frame me.
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* I say that his medical records and photographs were fakes, as a matter of logic. I know I didn’t strike the man once and hopefully by the end of this story you will believe me. So there is no way he was actually injured the way he claimed. So when he produced photographs there are only three logical possibilities, as far as I can see: 1) the photographs are fakes—where he put on makeup or used software Photoshop—to make himself appear bruised when he was not, 2) the photographs are real but were from a prior injury or 3) he was really bruised that day, but not by me. Either way, they are fakes. Likewise, Kimberlin’s medical records cannot genuinely reflect injuries I gave him, so therefore there are only two possibilities: either this convicted document forger forged medical records, or he was genuinely injured that day, but not by me. And in both cases there is the possibility that he had someone beat him up for him, or even caused himself harm. But bluntly, I think it is more likely that the documents were just phony in some fashion. It better fits with the criminal conduct he has engaged in, in the past.
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