At the driver's window, Reed had watched Beatrice offer her license and explain where the registration was kept. He remembered the flashlight, the slow movement toward the passenger side, and the stubborn glove compartment dropping open. He did not see anything in her hand that looked like a firearm. By the time he shouted a warning, Stanton was already moving toward the driver's door.
"Why did you shout that she had a gun?" Clark asked. Reed gripped the witness railing and answered that he had panicked when Stanton began the extraction and had wanted the situation to appear justified. He admitted that the word was false because he had not seen a weapon. The jury listened without interruption as he explained that he had realized the mistake almost immediately but had been afraid to correct it while his partner was using force.
Reed spoke about the struggle with visible difficulty. He remembered Beatrice's cheek against the pavement and the way she repeatedly said something was wrong with her shoulder. Stanton was still ordering her to stop resisting, and Reed placed the handcuffs on despite the older woman's warnings that her left arm was hurt. He acknowledged that the restraint increased her pain and that he could have stopped to request immediate medical assistance.
"Why didn't you?" Clark asked. "Because I was following him," Reed replied. "And because the longer it went on, the harder it felt to say we had made a mistake." He looked at Beatrice only briefly before adding that neither answer excused what he had done.
Clark asked about the drive to the station. Reed said Beatrice had become nauseated and disoriented, and that Stanton complained about the condition of the patrol car instead of asking whether she needed help. At the station, a desk sergeant eventually requested medical attention after seeing Beatrice's condition. Reed said he remembered standing nearby and feeling relief that someone else had finally made the decision he should have made himself.
The prosecutor presented the report revision history and asked Reed to explain the matching language. Reed admitted that Stanton had told him they needed consistent accounts and had provided a version that described active resistance and an apparent weapon threat. Reed knew the version contained things he had not observed, but he approved it anyway. The possibility of being accused of disloyalty, losing a job, or facing charges of his own had outweighed his willingness to tell the truth.
"Did Stanton say anything about Mrs. Hayes?" Clark asked. Reed hesitated, and the judge reminded him to distinguish exact remembered words from impressions. He testified that Stanton had dismissed the likelihood of a serious complaint because she was an elderly woman without influence, describing her as "nobody" who would become another file in a drawer. Reed admitted there was no independent recording of that particular exchange after the cameras were turned off in the station parking area, leaving the jury to evaluate his credibility.
Beatrice closed her eyes when she heard the word. She had never considered herself an important person, but she had spent decades being important to children, students, church members, neighbors, and people who barely remembered to thank her. The idea that her life could be dismissed as an administrative inconvenience hurt in a different place from the injury. Jackson reached for her good hand, then waited until she reached back so the choice would remain hers.