Chapter 101: Affidavits
Brandt would not let me take a single statement myself.
“You're the petitioner. Anything you touch, the state calls coached.”
So two students did it. Delphine Kroll, who had screened me, and a second-year named Aurelio Ness.
They had a list of six names. I had made the list. That was the part I was allowed.
One. Yusuf Bendix, of Bendix Auto Salvage, Fenner.
Two. The responding officer, retired in 2022.
Three. The paramedic who logged the scene at 22:41.
Four. Dean's foreman at the time, a man named Corbin Ault.
Five. Bree's roommate from that year, whose name I had off a graduation programme.
Six. The notary, whose name was on the jurat and nowhere else in the file.
They got four refusals in eleven days.
The officer said to talk to the county. The county said to submit it in writing. I did.
The paramedic said she had no independent recollection, which is the honest answer and also the useless one.
Ault said he did not want to be involved and hung up while Ness was still saying his own name.
The roommate agreed to a call, did not answer it twice, then blocked the number.
Nobody wants to sign. That is the thing nobody tells you about affidavits.
An affidavit is not a conversation. It is a paper you swear to, and people know that. They will tell you anything on the phone and nothing under their own name.
Bendix was different, and Bendix was different for a boring reason.
His father ran the yard in 2019, and his father had a policy that was about insurance, not justice.
Every vehicle that came in on a police tow got photographed before anyone touched it.
Interior, exterior, odometer, damage. Twenty-two frames, minimum.
They did it because a man once said the yard stole a stereo out of a wrecked Buick.
So there were photographs of my car from four forty-one in the morning, six hours after the crash.
They were on a CD-R in a Tyvek sleeve, in a lever-arch file, in a shed.
Filed under the lien number. Not the case number. Not the plate. The lien number.
That is why nobody found them. The court file and the yard file did not speak the same language, and I had spent two years learning what happens to a document indexed under the wrong key.
Kroll drove out on a Thursday. Bendix looked for forty minutes and came back with the file.
He signed. Two pages, notarised at a bank branch in Fenner, no fee.
He swore he found the disc in the ordinary course of business and that it had not been altered.
That is all an affidavit ever does. It puts a human being behind a piece of paper.
They copied the disc four times and drove the original back to the clinic in an evidence bag.
I saw the images on a Friday, on a monitor in a room with three other people in it.
Frame three was the rear of the car. Dark blue estate, hatch buckled, glass intact.
The university parking sticker was still on the back window, faded almost to nothing, but the shape of it was mine. I put it there in my second year and never scraped it off.
That frame is what made the disc admissible. It proved the photographs were of my car and not of a car.
Frame eleven was the dash. Twelve, the console. Thirteen, the pedals.
Frame fourteen was the driver's seat, shot from the open door, with a scale rule laid on the sill.
The seat was forward. It was obviously forward. You did not need an engineer to see it.
The headrest was at its lowest stop. The mirror was tilted up at an angle no tall person would choose.
Nobody in that room said anything for a moment, and then Ness said, “That's a short person's car.”
Brandt said, “That is an inadmissible sentence,” and asked for it printed at eleven by seventeen.
The metadata on frame fourteen read 04:41:19.
The crash was at 22:33 the night before. Six hours and eight minutes.
In those six hours the car was towed once and parked once. Nothing else happened to it.
Nobody had adjusted the seat, because the only person who might have was in a holding cell.
I asked Brandt whether the photographs alone were enough.
“No,” she said. “They're a fact. Facts aren't cases. We've had this conversation.”
“I remember.”
“But it moves the burden. Now the state has to explain why the seat was where it was.”
I asked what the state would say.
“That somebody moved it. A tow driver, a cop, a paramedic reaching across.”
“Can they prove that?”
“No. But they don't have to prove anything. That is the part people never accept.”
I said I accepted it. I had accepted it in a courtroom at twenty-four, without understanding a word of it.
I asked for a copy of frame fourteen for myself and she said no, not until it was filed.
She was right about that too. I got it eight weeks later, and I still have it, and it is not on my wall.
It is in a folder with the other items, in numerical order, where a document belongs.