1) photograph L-shaped tear in loveseat with fuzz sticking out, December 14 2) return December 15 without knowing Mulrenin has been shot 3) lift uninteresting loveseat section with moving blanket to move it, without disturbing TV control at edge 4) discover bullet underneath, but don’t photograph it or the area where it lay, instead pick up bullet for staging 5) collect bullet according to evidence log at 1205 PM 6) put loveseat back against wall without disturbing position of TV controller at edge 7) wait 23 minutes, take four photos of front door 8) photograph irrelevant loveseat section with L-shaped “small nick” that did not yet “register” at 1:28 PM 9) at the same time, stage bullet on floor in front of hole and photograph it, still 1:28 PM (DST) 10) "small nick" is now pressed inward without fuzz, and is described at trial as semicircular like a bullet 11) determine hole goes straight through, but don't document that 12) finally raise interesting recliner section where blood is, shifting item in cupholder, and photograph that 13) finally pull loveseat back out, and photograph linear "exit hole" with recliner mechanics 14) never log sofa with bullet hole, knork, duct tape, and blood of murder victim, into evidence 15) remove "burglary a with firearm" charge from jail charge list, add "robbery no firearm" around January 11 The label showed that sofa was made by Haining Happy Leather in 2014. I found many similar to it, and one almost exactly like it, and the love seats did not recline. But I did find similar sofas in later years, with reclining loveseats. Suppose Haining made one sofa like that where the loveseat was a recliner. Such loveseat recliners weigh over 200 pounds, and could not be pulled away from the wall to find a bullet without disturbing the TV controller. One theory is that Mulrenin was actually shot standing, near the recliner end of the sofa. The bullet went straight through the wall and into the empty apartment next door. And it was recovered there several days later by a maintenance employee, or after the medical examiner found a gunshot wound. (The maintenance employee could be the dog walker, or could be known to Love from when he did maintenance there, but that is too much to get into.) Sprague then brought the bullet into Mulrenin's apartment, pushed in the fiizz you can see in the L-shaped tear in the loveseat the previous day, wrote the "BHl " card, and had Smolarek stage the bullet photographs in front of the tear. Since there was no blood spatter on the tear, the tear could be consistent with a stray gunshot while Mulrenin was fleeing. But the blood under the recliner was fiirther from the balcony than the loveseat. And the marks on the bullet from traveling horizontally through the zig-zag spring were also a problem for the "shot while fleeing" narrative, because the bullet did not actually exit under the tear in the loveseat. The bullet was supposedly found on December 15, 2016. A gunshot wound was documented at Mulrenin's autopsy on December 16, 2016. On December 19, 2016 at Love’s police interview, around the time Love's house is being searched, Sprague mentions having found an "array of weapons, not necessarily things that were involved with the case." Sprague then recites charges at Love’s interview that do not involve a firearm. What police called a knife, was found on the recliner where Mulrenin bled. They swabbed the knife handle for DNA. But they never sent that swab to the lab. Because once the lab has that DNA report, the defense will say where did this come from? A knife found where? Why isn’t there a picture of that? Where is that recliner? Probably their first plan was to throw away the bloody recliner where Mulrenin sat after being shot, and say he was shot while fleeing past the loveseat. That is why the loveseat was the first place they photographed on the 15th, and there was a moving blanket next to it. But the autopsy on the 16th or the 17th showed an improbable bullet path through Mulrenin's leg, to make that hole in the loveseat. He would have to have been on the sofa facing the wall, not fleeing. And there would have been spatter on the hole. And of course no repeating dents in the bullet. So at some intermediate point Sprague lost his mind, and just threw away the sofa, and then removed any mention of a firearm from the charge list before the grand jury. They replaced it with assault or battery, and robbery no firearm. Perhaps around this time, they hoped to go to a "thrown off the balcony" narrative or who even knows what. Because tying Mandi more directly to Mulrenin going over, was more important than the evidence or the truth. III - 56