The Fatal Game: Justice for Alexa Bartell

0:00Hey, it's Kelly Rowland. You may not know this, but I have Exema. So I get how it can steal your time. But why let Exema take over when you can talk to your doctor about Epglyce? Epglyce, lubricism ab LBKZ, a 250-mg per 2-mg leador injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older, who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe Exema. Also called a topic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. Epglyce can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you are allergic to Epglyce. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have newer, worsening eye problems, you should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Epglyce. Before starting Epglyce, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Paid partnership with Lili Respect your time. Ask your doctor about Epglyce and visit Epglyce.com or call 1-800-LiliRx or 1-800-545-5979. Your path to pharmacy can be closer than you think.

1:02West Coast University's hybrid doctor of pharmacy program can be completed in as little as 33 months and no bachelor's degree is required to apply. If you've started pharmacy coursework elsewhere, WCU may accept eligible transfer credits to help students keep moving forward. Learn online, train hands-on at our Center for Graduate Studies in Los Angeles, and prepare for real-world pharmacy practice. West Coast University, as real as it gets, visit westcoastuniversity.edu. WCU cannot guarantee employment. Imagine your friend tells you she's taking an innocent family trip to Greenville, South Carolina. We'll call her Emma. The trip sounds great to you. Hiking at Jones Gap, dinner at Topsoil, a room at the best hotel in town. Harmless, right? Here's the thing. Emma and her family never return from Greenville. They disappear. You search for answers, but nothing adds up. Emma had a great life back home. You guys were best friends. What happened? Well, the truth is, once Emma realized she could have access to Michelin recognized restaurants,

2:04nature, local shops, and performing arts all in one place, everywhere else started to seem a little. Meh. Emma's vacation is a cautionary tale. If you're coming this way, don't forget to tell your friends and neighbors goodbye. Visit Greenville, South Carolina, but you may never want to leave. Learn more at visit GreenvilleSC.com. You know, there is a very specific kind of safety that we feel when we're driving inside a car at night. Oh, absolutely. Like the doors are locked. The heaters on. Right. Maybe you have, you know, your favorite audiobook playing quietly in the background. Right. You were just cocooned in this steel cage, moving through the dark, and it feels entirely impenetrable. Like you are completely in control of your immediate environment. It is, it's a fascinating psychological space, really, because it is, well, it's entirely an illusion of isolation. We put this blind trust

3:06in the physics of the road, you know, the painted yellow lines. And we inherently trust that the headlights coming toward us belong to people who are just well, trying to get home exactly like we exactly. Yeah. It's basically an unwritten social contract that governs our entire transportation system. Like you stay in your lane, I stay in mind. We both survive the night. Right. But that trust relies entirely on everyone actually, you know, playing by the rules. Yes, it does. And tonight we're looking at a case where that contract wasn't just broken. It was violently senselessly shattered. It really was. So our mission today is to unpack a truly chilling true crime case that was meticulously documented in a recent investigative transcript from the police insider channel. And it's a heavy one. It is. And for you, listening right now, as someone who wants to understand not just the what's, but, you know, the how and the why, this case is an absolute master class. Yeah, I cover so much ground. Right. We're looking at behavioral escalation, the painstaking, Neelanahaystack reality of forensic investigation, and the

4:10terrifying consequences of digital footprints. Okay. Let's unpack this because we really need to set the stage here. What's fascinating here is that this case completely defies your typical criminal motives. Yeah. Totally. I mean, we aren't talking about robbery. There's no financial gain here whatsoever. Right. No money involved. Exactly. We aren't talking about revenge or like a drug deal gone bad or a crime of passion. It's a study in a terrifying concept. But pure unadulterated boredom that gets weaponized into extreme lethal violence. Wow. It really is the banality of evil and its most modern form. It is. So let's establish the inciting incident to really understand the states before we, you know, get into the police war room. This all begins on a Wednesday night. Just a random Wednesday. Right. Not a wild chaotic holiday weekend. A completely mundane boring Wednesday night in the Boulder, Colorado area, specifically driving down Highway 93 in Indiana Street. And the timeline of what happens next is incredibly

5:11compressed, which I think makes the randomness of it even more terrifying. Yeah, the speed of it all. Exactly. Over a span of just 40 minutes, seven different cars were struck by large rocks thrown from a moving vehicle. 40 minutes, seven cars. Seven different drivers completely disconnected from one another, suddenly experiencing this violent impact in the pitch black. To give you a sense of what this actually looked and felt like. There's a driver in a Subaru who police leader interviewed. Right. I remember his statement. He tells him he was just driving along in the dark. No other cars around him. And out of the corner of his eye, he sees a rock for maybe a single second before it hits terrifying. It shatters his windshield completely takes out his front license plate and sprays a ton of glass directly into his eyes and face just out of nowhere. Yeah, he's temporarily blinded. He's swerving. Slam in on his brakes. And honestly, the structural integrity of modern safety glass is the only thing that saved him in that moment. How so? Well, windshields are

6:12designed with a layer of laminate between the glass to prevent total penetration from road debris. Oh, right. So it's spider webs instead of shattering completely. Exactly. That laminate absorbs a massive amount of the rocks momentum. So he manages to keep the car on the road instead of creaning into a ditch. I mean, think about the psychology of that moment for the victim. The profound isolation. Oh, absolutely. He's bleeding. He's, you know, picking glass out of his eyes on the side of a dark highway. And the vehicle that did it is just a pair of tail lights disappearing at the night. Just gone. It's terrifying. He survives, thankfully. But the tragic climax of this 40-minute window happens when a 20-year-old woman named Alexa Bartell crosses paths with this same truck. Yeah. Alexa was returning home from a friend's house after spending a happy day with them. Just a normal day. Completely normal. She's driving a Chevrolet spark, which for context is a very small lightweight compact car. Right. She's heading north on an empty stretch of road. And coming toward her heading south is a pickup truck. And this isn't just a truck casually passing by.

7:17The truck is speeding toward her vehicle at nearly 80 miles per hour. 80 miles per hour. Yeah, and within seconds of them crossing paths, a massive landscaping rock is hurled directly at the driver's side of her car. Just incredibly fast. It crashes through her window, strikes her in the head, and it carries so much force that it exits straight through the rear windshield of her car. Through the entire car. Yeah. Her vehicle then swerves completely off the road, plows into a field, and finally comes to a stop after hitting a fence. We really need to pause and look at the physics here, because it is crucial to understanding the severity of this crime. Yeah. Lay it out for us. You have a truck traveling at 80 miles per hour in one direction. You have a Lexus car traveling at highway speeds, let's say 50 miles per hour in the opposite direction. Right. When you throw a heavy object between two vehicles moving toward each other, you don't just calculate the speed of the throw because they're coming at each other. Exactly. Their speeds essentially combine. We are talking about a closing speed well over 130 miles per hour.

8:20That is just, I mean, it's not just a prank. It's an artillery shell. It literally is. If you apply the formula for kinetic energy to a five or 10 pound landscaping rock moving at 130 miles per hour, it's like a meteorite striking your car on a quiet drive. That's a very accurate comparison. There is absolutely no warning. There is no way to swerve, no way to brace for impact, and it begs this massive legal and moral question for you to listen to, right? At what point does a teenage prank legally cross the line into the deployment of a lethal weapon? Well, the law looks at intent versus outcome. And we will get into the legal doctrine of extreme and difference a bit later, but you hit on the key mechanism there, kinetic energy. Yeah. At that velocity, the mass of that rock carries energy comparable to a small explosive. Wow. It ceases to be mischief. The millisecond that leaves the hand, the human skull, the safety glass of a side window, which by the way isn't laminated like a front windshield. It is just tempered to shatter, right? It just crumbles into pieces.

9:24Exactly. They stand absolutely no chance against that kind of focused kinetic energy. So you have this devastating physical impact, but the way it is discovered bridges the physical reality with our modern digital lives. Yeah. This part is really haunting because Alexa wasn't just alone in the car. She was actually on the phone with her girlfriend when the rocket. Yeah. According to the transcripts, her girlfriend is just having a completely normal conversation with Alexa. And suddenly the line goes completely silent just abruptly. Right. It doesn't disconnect immediately. It's just dead air. I mean, anyone would panic in that situation. You assume maybe a cell tower dropped a signal, but when she doesn't answer on redial, what do you do? You start looking for them. Exactly. The girlfriend uses the Find My iPhone app. She tracks Alexa's ed's location and she sees that the phone, presumably the car, is stopped in the middle of a field way off the highway, which immediately tells you something is terribly wrong. Right. She immediately alerts emergency services and calls Alexa's other Jenna. And this creates an incredibly rapid,

10:26but chaotic response. Yeah. It means the family arrives at the scene almost simultaneously with the first responders, which is a nightmare. Yeah. When Jenna arrives, she instinctively runs toward her daughter's car in this dark field. And the first responders actually have to physically restrain her. They had to hold her back. Yeah. They cannot let a mother see what is inside that vehicle. E-Inviscated reports are incredibly grim, but they are necessary for you to understand the gravity of the crime. They really are. Alexa's face was completely unrecognizable. The trauma to her head was so severe that bits of brain tissue were actually scattered on the shattered rear windshield. God. And you know, the sheer brutality of that scene forces an immediate paradigm shift for the responding officers. Penny me. Well, initially finding a car off the road in a field looks like a tragic, but you know, standard single vehicle traffic accident. Right. Like maybe a driver fell asleep. Exactly. Or swerved to miss a deer. But the catastrophic localized damage to

11:26the driver's side window coupled with the catastrophic head trauma that doesn't match a steering wheel impact. It changes everything. It changes the entire protocol. They immediately realized this is a homicide investigation. And they start calculating the geometry of the strike. Right. Yes. They know that Alexis's vehicle was driving north. So based on the point of impact on the side window and the trajectory through the rear window, the projectile had to come from a vehicle traveling southbound. And that realization triggers a massive logistical nightmare for law enforcement. Because the scene is so big. Exactly. They are no longer just securing a static car in a field. They are suddenly looking at a dynamic moving crime scene that stretches across miles of dark highway. Wow. They have to preserve debris fields, find glass scatter and look for the actual projectile in the dark. All while managing a grieving family and coordinating with other jurisdictions who might be receiving similar 911 calls. Okay, let them pack this for a second. Because here's where it gets really interesting. Think about the chilling juxtaposition of this moment. Right. You have

12:29this modern everyday technology. The find my iPhone app, something we use to like find our keys in the couch cushions or passively make sure our kids got to school. Yeah, totally mundane. And it is the exact tool that delivers a mother to the most horrifying real world discovery imaginable. It accelerates the timeline of grief in a way that previous generations just didn't experience. That's a point. In decades past, a family might not know for hours, you know, just waiting for a police knock on the door the next morning. Here, the digital tether we all keep to our loved ones, thrust them into the trauma in real time. But crucially, that same digital tether is what the police are going to have to pivot to in order to find the killers. Right, because at this exact moment, they have a massive scattered crime scene and absolutely zero physical suspects. Nothing. No license plate, no faces. How do you even begin a man hunt for a ghost vehicle on a highway? It's incredibly daunting. So the narrative shifts from the side of the road to the police

13:32war room. They start by going door to door, so to speak, interviewing every single victim from that 40 minute window who called in a smashed windshield because they are looking for any common denominator. And they get a crucial piece of information from a 10.31 PM 911 call. Oh, right. The guy with the glass in his eyes. Yes, he's one of the victims who got glass in his eyes. He gives them a very specific description. He says it was a tall truck, incredibly bright high beams. And he explicitly notes that he saw an individual stand up and out of the sunroof to throw the rock. A sunroof. Okay, so they have a description tall truck, bright lights, sunroof, right. They immediately pull CCTV footage from a local Kumango gas station located along the highway route, standard procedure. And they review the tape and find footage of three teenagers exiting a white pickup truck during the exact window of the attacks. I mean, it seems like a massive break. It really does. Three teenagers in a truck on the right road at the right time. This is where police work requires

14:34immense discipline. Why is that? Because the pressure to close a high profile homicide is just enormous and cognitive bias can easily creep in. Right. You want the pieces to fit. Exactly. You want the evidence to fit the suspect you have on camera. But the detectives examine the footage of the white truck and they realize it completely lacks a sunroof. And the victim was explicit about the sunroof. I mean, they could have easily rationalized it, right. They could have said, well, it was dark. Maybe the victim saw someone hang out the side window and confused it for a sunroof. Exactly. That's his trap of confirmation bias. But despite the circumstantial alignment, they rule the white truck out. That takes restraint. It does. They refuse to force the evidence to fit a convenient narrative, which is commendable. But it also means they are back to square one. Pretty might. They spend four grueling days scouring social media. They're looking for any post bragging about throwing rocks, looking for similar incidents in neighboring towns. They're literally

15:34trying to find a needle in a digital haystack. It's exhausting work until finally, the breakthrough arrives and an informant contacts the police. And this isn't just a random tipster. No, this is an individual who was actually inside the suspect vehicle before the fatal strike occurred. Wow. So the informant sits down with the detectives and he just lays it all out. He says he was hanging out with a kid named Joe who works with him and two other guys, Mitch and Zach. They go to a Walmart in Westminster and the informant watches as Joe, Mitch and Zach start loading heavy land escaping rocks from outside the Walmart into the bed of the truck. And the informant tells the police that the moment he saw them loading the rocks, he knew they were going to cause chaos. Clause care. Yeah. He demanded to be taken home immediately. He wanted absolutely no part of what was about to happen. And he provides the critical correction. The police desperately needed to fix their timeline. Right. The truck color. Exactly. The truck wasn't white. Joe was driving a black Chevy Silverado 1500. That changes everything. And the informant is so cooperative that he even tells

16:39police that when he was getting out of the truck at his house, he accidentally knocked one of the rocks out of the cab and he offers it to the police as physical evidence. Just hands it over. He literally hands in the exact type of weapon used to kill Alexa. If we connect this to the bigger picture, the psychology of this informant's actions is a fascinating study in group dynamics. How so? Well, in sociological terms, we often talk about group polarization. Okay. It's the tendency for a group to make decisions that are more extreme than the initial inclination of its members. The informant had the moral compass to recognize the escalating danger. He sought coming. He broke the group thing and extracted himself from the vehicle. I hear that, but I had to push back a little here. Sure. If you know your friends are loading literal boulders into a truck specifically to quote, cause chaos on a public highway. Isn't silence a form of complexity? It's a tough question. I mean, he goes home and goes to sleep. Why wait until a 20-year-old

17:43girl is dead and the highway is shut down to speak up? It's a very fair, difficult, ethical question, but you have to consider the cognitive dissonance happening in his brain in that moment. He didn't want to believe they'd actually do it. He likely rationalized it. He might have thought they were just going to smash rural mailboxes or, you know, throw rocks at street signs. Property damage, not murder. Exactly. This psychological leap from vandalism to lethal violence is massive. And it reels really hard for a normal brain to predict that extreme escalation in real time. He knew it was bad, which is why he left, but he probably didn't conceive it would be lethal. That makes sense. Is that normalcy bias, right? Yeah. And assuming things will turn out fine because they usually do, still, his confession gives the police their targets.

18:54For more information, visit www.happyglp.com.com. They now have the mastermind's shadow cast clearly on the wall. They know exactly who they're looking for. The suspects are Joe Konig, who was the driver and owner of the Black Silverado, Mitch Carolchick, who was the passenger, and was actually scheduled to ship out to the Marines in July. Wow. And Zach, who was sitting in the back seat. And the police know they can't just pick them up casually one by one because they'll warn each other. Right. These guys are tightly met friends. They are constantly on their phones.

20:00If you arrest Mitch at 2.am, he manages to send a single text message to Joe and suddenly phones are being wiped, evidence is being destroyed, or someone goes on the run. So the police coordinate a simultaneous raid. They hit all three houses at the exact same moment in the middle of the night, which is intense. It is. And when they hit Joe's house, the environment is incredibly hostile. But it's not just coming from Joe. Joe's father aggressively obstructs the police. The bodycam transcripts show the father demanding warrants refusing to let the police take Joe's phone, refusing to even let them grab Joe a shirt before taking him out. Yeah, the father is physically blocking the door, getting combative, just completely uncooperative. And the police clearly articulate to him, look, this is a fresh pursuit case, an ongoing homicide investigation. We are taking him at his phone right now to preserve evidence. But the dad refuses to back down and he actually ends up getting arrested for obstruction alongside his son, unbelievable, which when you look at it offers a profound psychological insight into Joe's upbringing.

21:05It really does. When criminologists look at juvenile delinquency that escalates into severe violence, they almost always look at the home environment for baseline behaviors. Makes sense. And here we see a parent whose first instinct isn't shock or, you know, cooperation with murder investigation, but an aggressive instinct to deflect, obstruct authority and shield his son from consequence. And that absolute lack of consequence is the defining theme of Joe's entire life. Oh, absolutely. Because after the arrest hits the news, a middle school friend of Joe's contacts the police to fill in the blanks on who Joe really is. And it's not a pretty picture. The picture he paints is chilling. He says Joe has a heavily documented history of behavioral escalation. The friend tells police that back in seventh grade Joe was stealing Adderall from him. Right. Then by eighth or ninth grade Joe was climbing on a roost with a pellet gun, intentionally shooting at passing cars and blowing out neighborhood windows. And psychologically that is rehearsal behavior rehearsal behavior. Yes, he is testing boundaries, desensitizing himself to the act of firing projectiles at moving targets.

22:14Wow. The friend describes Joe as a relentless bully who pressured other kids into drugs and showed a complete and utter lack of remorse for anyone he heard. And what happened when Joe was caught shooting at the neighborhood windows. His parents simply paid the neighbors for the broken glass. Exactly. There was no real intervention. I look at Joe like a slow moving train wreck. The warning lights were flashing. The bells were ringing since middle school. Everyone saw it. And it makes you wonder as a society, how often do we dismiss juvenile delinquency as just boys being boys too often. We write off the stolen pills, the pellet guns, the broken windows as growing pains right up until the exact moment it turns lethal. It is a systemic failure of early intervention. The friend explicitly noted that while everyone else in their peer group was maturing and naturally growing out of stupid destructive behavior. Joe was accelerating. He was escalating. Yes, he was constantly seeking higher thresholds of thrill because the lower thresholds, the pellet guns,

23:15no longer satisfied that anti-social boredom. He needed a bigger impact. So you take that accelerating anti-social boredom. You put it in an interrogation room with seasoned homicide detectives and you get an absolute master class in deception and psychological warfare. Oh, the interrogation transcripts are fascinating. When you put multiple suspects in separate interrogation rooms simultaneously, you are relying heavily on the prisoner's dilemma. Right. Separate rooms. No communication. Exactly. You isolate them so they have no idea what the others are saying. And you create an environment where their best perceived option is to turn on each other to save themselves. But they all take very different approaches to the pressure cooker. They do. Joe, the driver, immediately lawyers up. His father yells, the only word you know is lawyer. And Joe actually follows that advice. He refuses to speak. Which legally speaking is the smartest play you can make in that room. Oh, 100%. Yeah. But Mitch, the passenger who is heading to the Marines, takes a totally different route. Yeah, he talks. He thinks he is smart enough to pop his way out of a homicide charge.

24:18Uh, and you can see the desperation in the transcript. He starts by trying to establish a baseline of innocence by playing the sympathy card. He claims he was feeling sick that night and just wanted to go home early. Right. He admits to the timeline that the police already know because of the informant. He admits they went to Walmart. They dropped off the informant and they went to the Kumango. He knows he can't lie about being in the truck because there are cameras and witnesses that place him there. He's trying to be half honest. Exactly. So instead of denying his presence, he tries to minimize his role in the violence. He points the finger directly at Zach in the back seat. Mitch claims Zach was the one throwing rocks at parked cars. But then Mitch makes a very calculated, fascinating admission. This part is wild. He tells the detectives, I'm not going to lie. I threw one rock. But I completely missed and I felt so bad about it that I stopped. It's a classic move. Wait, I need to stop you there. Why on earth would you admit to throwing a rock at all?

25:18If you were trying to convince detectives, you were innocent of murder. Because it's a highly documented interrogation tactic used by suspects often subconsciously. Really? Yes. Criminals will frequently admit to a lesser crime like throwing a rock and missing or being present for a burglary but not the assault to feign transparency and honesty. The psychological calculus is basically, if I confess to this minor misdemeanor and show remorse, the detectives will view me as cooperative and believe me when I deny the murder. Ah, so he's trying to buy credibility with a cheap coin? Exactly. But the detectives don't buy it for a second. They push back hard. They tell Mitch his story is a complete nonsense based on the damage they've seen. They know better. Mitch gets defensive. He claims he was just sitting in the passenger seat, passively watching Joe and Zach laugh as they threw rocks. Just an innocent bystander. Right. And when they directly ask him about the fatal strike that killed Alexa, Mitch claims he didn't throw it.

26:19He says he just saw a car roll off into a ditch and innocently thought they had a broken tie rod. Now, notice what the detectives are doing here. What's that? They are masterful. They let Mitch lie. They don't immediately present all their evidence. They just let him dig his hole. Exactly. They let him build this intricate, fragile scaffolding of falsehoods, trapping him in a narrative they know is objectively false based on the physics of the crime scene and the timeline. Yeah. Once a suspect locks themselves into a detailed lie, every piece of contradictory evidence you introduce shatters their credibility entirely. So what does this all mean? Mitch is basically saying, I was there. I handed them rocks. I made me through a small one that missed, but I didn't throw the fatal rock. Yes. I compare this defense to a firing squad. If you and your friends line up and shoot at a car, does it really matter whose specific bullet pierced the victim's skull? If you all pulled the trigger, aren't you all murderers? Legally and morally, yes, you are.

27:19And the detectives make that explicitly clear to Mitch. They begin to explain the legal concept of extreme indifference to human life. Which means it doesn't require premeditated intent to kill a specific person. It requires a universal malice, a total disregard for the value of human life that results in death. So nine months after the arrest, Mitch finally realizes Joe isn't going to save him. And he tells the police the real story. If he finally cracks. Yeah. We are transitioning now from the lies told to the detectives to the horrifying truth of what actually happened inside the cab of that black silverado. And the timeline of depravity they engage in is just staggering. It really is. They start by shoplifting snacks at the Walmart. Then they drive to an apex parking lot and Mitch and Zach get out and physically steal 15 to 20 heavy landscaping rocks. Just loading up. Yes, loading them into the cab of the truck so they have an arsenal at their feet. And as they start driving down the highway, Mitch is sitting in the passenger seat, literally picking up rocks from around his feet

28:21and handing them to Joe at the driver to throw out the window at oncoming cars. A literal assembly line of violence. And they're treating it like a twisted video game. Mitch admits they were using military terminology, calling out targets by shouting contact left or contact right as headlights approached. That military jargon contact left contact right is a psychological mechanism of disassociation. Disassociation? Yeah. By using combat terminology, they are dehumanizing the drivers in the oncoming cars. They aren't throwing rocks at mothers, daughters or fathers. They're just targets. Exactly. They are engaging anonymous targets. It allows them to completely detach from the lethal flesh and blood reality of their actions. Treating human lives like non-playable characters in a video game, it's sickening. It is. And then we get to the fatal moment. Mitch tells detectives he picked up a massive, muddy landscaping rock from the floorboards. But he says it was too big, too heavy for him to comfortably throw out the window at high speed, so he tosses it aside in the cab.

29:22Right. And Zach sitting in the back seat picks it up and says, if you're not going to throw it, I will. Hmm. And at this exact moment, Joe, the driver, sees the headlights of Alexis Carr approaching. Here we go. And instead of maintaining speed or slowing down, Mitch looks at this pedometer and sees Joe intentionally accelerate the truck to nearly 80 miles per hour, specifically to maximize the impact. Unbelievable. And as the cars pass, Zach throws the massive rock. And the rock hits. This is where the story goes from reckless negligence to cold-blooded depravity because immediately after the strike, Zach looks out the back window and says, I think they went off the road. We have to go see that. They don't panic and flee in terror at what they've done. They don't pull over and call 911. They are magnetized by the destruction. Joe pulls the truck over to the shoulder. They dump the remaining rocks in the grass to clear the evatives from the cab. And then Joe executes a U-turn on the highway. They drive past Alexis' rigged car.

30:22Not once. Not twice. They drive past her car three times. Three times. And on the third pass, Joe slows the truck down to 50 miles per hour, specifically so Zach can take a souvenir picture of the wreckage through the back windshield. What's fascinating here is how clearly this establishes the legal threshold we discussed earlier, extreme indifference to human life. Right. The decision to turn around to treat the catastrophic wreckage of a young woman's life as a photo opportunity removes any shadow of a doubt that this was an accident or a prank gone wrong. It proves active malice. It shows a terrifying detachment from reality. I keep asking myself, what happens in a car full of teenagers that makes basic human empathy completely evaporate? It's a toxic combination of the group polarization we discussed, where individuals feed off each other's adrenaline to normalize extreme behavior and a shared psychopathy fueled by that anti-social boredom and a profound lack of consequence in their lives. It's a perfect storm. They amplify each other's darkest impulses until the humanity of the victim was entirely erased

31:23from their collective minds. And the sheer audacity doesn't end there. Later that same night, after dropping the others off, Mitch is driving his own vehicle. He tells police he feels a gut feeling and actually drives back to the crime scene alone. He goes back. He sees the police lights, the ambulance, the road shutdown, and he takes a photo on Snapchat of the red and blue lights and he sends it to Joe and Zach with a caption. We fucked up. And that Snapchat is the digital fingerprint of their guilt. It proves they knew exactly what they had done. They knew it was catastrophic and they recognized their shared culpability. Which brings us to the final act of this tragedy. The pact, the betrayal, and the complex legal sentences that follow. Because once the arrests happen, the loyalties between these boys begin to fracture under the weight of life sentences. But not before they try to orchestrate a ridiculous cover-up. Of course. According to Mitch, on the night they realize the police are closing in, Joe text him and picks him up. And where does the mastermind take his accomplice to plan their high-stakes criminal defense?

32:28I still can't believe this part. Dairy queen. It is such a surreal absurd detail that highlights their immaturity. Honestly. You master my numerator, you shut down a major highway, and you're sit down to establish alibis happens over soft-serve ice cream. It's just bizarre. Joe buys the ice cream and establishes a code word. Moose. Moose. Yes, Moose. If the cops show up, text the word moose and whatever happens, never, ever speak to the police. But the moose pact doesn't last. As you mentioned, nine months of sitting in a jail cell, facing the very real, very adult reality of a life sentence breaks Mitch. He caves. He realizes Joe and Zach aren't going to save him. So he flips. He admits he lied to detectives initially to protect Joe, who was his best friend. He decides to protect himself. But at trial, the narrative becomes incredibly messy, which must have been absolute torture for Alex's family to endure. Because Mitch's story keeps changing, depending on who he is talking to, right? He initially told detectives that Zach threw the fatal rock, but later, he told his own defense lawyers that Joe threw it.

33:30Which is a huge contradiction. Huge. And when Mitch actually takes the stand at trial to testify against Joe, he insists that Joe threw the rock, directly contradicting his earlier sworn statements to police. I am confused by how a prosecutor handles that. If your star witness keeps changing who the actual trigger man was, doesn't that destroy your case? It definitely complicates it. Defense attorneys will absolutely weaponize that shifting testimony to create reasonable doubt. They absolutely will. And they did. But this is where we have to look closely at the legal doctrine of complicity. Okay. Under the law of complicity, it doesn't always matter who the specific trigger man is. If everyone was actively participating in the underlying felony that led to the death. Okay. Let's unpack that. It's like the Getaway Driver analogy, right? Exactly. If you drive the Getaway car for a bank robbery and your partner shoots the teller, you are still charged with felony murder, even if you never stepped foot in the bank or held a gun. Exactly. This raises an important question, right?

34:31If you engage in a lethal group activity, if you gather the weapons from the apex parking lot, if you target the victims by calling out headlights, if you drive the vehicle at 80 miles per hour to maximize the impact, you are commensurate to the crime. You're all in it together. You share the guilt of the blood spilled, regardless of who's specific hand released the stone. But how does that shifting blame impact the families? Yes, the law might view them all as guilty. But for a mother who lost her daughter, she wants to know exactly what happened in those final seconds. It forces the families to endure a profound secondary trauma. I can't even imagine. They have to sit in a courtroom day after day and watch the people responsible for their daughter's brutal death point fingers at each other like children dodging a timeout. Just brutal. It prevents the family from getting a clean, unified narrative of the truth. It denies them closure. Ultimately, the justice system cuts through the finger pointing. In 2024, despite the shifting stories and the dairy queen packs,

35:33the outcomes were severe. They were. Joe Coneg, the ringleader who refused to plea and took a chance as a trial, was sentenced to life in prison. Mitch Keralkick, who eventually flipped and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, was sentenced to 45 years. And Zach, who pleaded guilty to first degree assault, received 32 years in prison. Three young lives entirely thrown away and one innocent life completely destroyed, all because of an escalating desire to cure a Wednesday night boredom. It is a terrifying journey. We've gone from a mundane evening trip to Walmart to life sentences in a state penitentiary. And as we summarize this deep dive, the thing that stands out most to me is how a massive wall of teenage lies, lies bound by dairy queen packs and middle school loyalties was completely systematically dismantled by digital footprints. If you look closely at the investigation, it wasn't a traditional smoking gun that caught them. No, it wasn't. It was a web of data. It was the CCTV at a gas station placing them in the area.

36:36It was the Find My iPhone app that located the victim and established the exact time of death. And it was the Snapchat message explicitly admitting guilt. And that leaves us with a final provocative thought to ponder as we wrap up today. Think about the permanence of the digital world versus the fragility of human memory and human loyalty. That's a great point. These suspects genuinely thought they could just delete a Snapchat. They thought they could establish a childish code word, keep their mouths shut, and effectively erase a brutal crime from existence. But they couldn't. Because the metadata of their lives, the cell phone pings bouncing off towers on Highway 93, triangulating their exact speed and location, the app tracking, the surveillance cameras, that data told a meticulous undeniable story their mouth is refused to tell. As we move through the world, our devices are constantly acting and silent witnesses to our lives. Every text, every location paying every photo. Constantly watching. And it makes you wonder, does this digital omnipresence actually deter crime?

37:37Or does it just force criminals to realize far too late that in the modern world, the illusion of the dark, impenetrable car is just that. An illusion. There is truly nowhere left to hide. A haunting reality to consider. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive. Keep questioning the world around you. Keep looking for the why behind the what, and we will be right back here with you next time.