17. SMOLAREK BULLET HOLE - December 2016 Something strange happened around January 11, 2017 right before the grand jury. The "burglary of a dwelling with a firearm" charge, number 4 in Mandi J ackson's charge list, was purged from the list controlled by police at the Seminole County Jail. It was replaced with new charge number 5 "burglary of a dwelling with an assault or battery" and new charge number 6 "robbery no firearm or weapon." Prosecutors don’t delete charges at the jail, they simply label charges not filed with the clerk. So this suggests the police for some reason wanted to get rid of any mention of a firearm in the charges before it went to the grand jury. Why would they want to do this if they have a bullet hole and a gun? My only guess is they they tampered with the bullet evidence to where they thought it was a lost cause, and threw away the sofa. The day they came back and supposedly happened to find the bullet, the photo series did not begin with a date card like the previous day. The date card from the previous day shows two different people's handwriting. I concluded it to be Detective Sprague and CST Smolarek. The person who wrote "BH1" on the first photo of the alleged bullet hole, appears to have been Sprague rather than Smolarek. So it seems Sprague, not Smolarek as claimed, discovered this supposed bullet hole. On the second day, the hole was now pressed in. The previous day it was an L-shaped tear with fuzz sticking out. Smolarek claimed in deposition and at Scott Love's trial, that she recovered a bullet under the sofa, when she and detectives lifted the loveseat up on December 15th, 2016. Smolarek claimed at trial that the L-shaped tear on the loveseat was a hole straight through the middle of the seat. But the bullet has clear marks on it which show the bullet collided with a series of four or five identical hard objects (or the same object four or five times), and collided with and possibly ricocheted off of another one or two. The bullet presented could not have been shot through the hole, and recovered where Smolarek claimed to recover it. Because there was probably no hard object, but at most one hard object, between the supposed entry and exit holes that go straight through the middle of the seat. Assuming they are even in the same section of the sofa. Smolarek did not say why they came back on that day, and lifted up the loveseat section of sofa first. Each section of the sofa is separate. According to her photos and testimony, they lifted up the loveseat section with a bullet under it, before they had any idea there was a bullet under it. And they lifted the irrelevant loveseat up before they raised the more interesting recliner section with the blood. Smolarek didn't say why they then put the loveseat back down and pushed it back against the wall, and placed the bullet in front of it, instead of photographing the bullet where it was found when the loveseat was lifted. She didn't say why it was so important to photograph the nick in the sofa which she believed was irrelevant, instead of just photograph the bullet immediately where it was found. She said the nick didn't "register" as a bullet hole, until she found the bullet. If you don’t believe there is a bullet hole at the time you fmd the bullet, why put the sofa back down, and then stage the bullet in front of the hole, before taking a photograph? After I complained to the FDLE, Smolarek changed her story. At Scott’s trial it was "We had no idea that L-shaped tear was a bullet hole until we found a bullet under it." At Mandi's trial it was "We saw that L-shaped tear, and thought hey that's a bullet hole, let's look to see if there is a bullet under it." This supposedly on December 15, when according to officers Uzzi and Van Cleave, medicolegal investigator Lora Zedick, and Smolarek herself in prior sworn testimony, nobody suspected there had been a gunshot. Smolarek claimed at trial, on the stand, under oath, that she personally found the bullet under the loveseat. But according to the evidence log and the times on her photos, she took four photos of the front door, and waited 23 minutes, before photographing the bullet she found at 1205. Impossible. If she believed there was a bullet hole in the sofa at the time she found the bullet, she would have photographed the exit hole under the sofa before pushing the sofa back against the wall. She would not push the sofa back against the wall, spend a while taking photos of other areas, then come back and photograph the exit hole. But the supposed exit hole photo was many photos and some time later, after they photographed other parts of the sofa. III - 54