Reply #19: Witnesses tend to be unreliable in a situation like that.

[jobycom]

Probably a few saw it exactly as it happened, a few are pretty close, and a few saw something way off. There's no way to know which ones are right without knowing what happened.

When shots are fired, a lot of people flinch or turn away, at least for a moment, so their minds fill in what the expect to happen from the last moment they saw, and what they saw afterward, and sometimes what others told them happened. A lot of them truly remember seeing the whole thing, but didn't. Victims turn away at the last moment, or lower their heads, or some sudden move. There are many cases where a victim is facing their assailant, yet they get shot in the back because at the last moment they try to turn, or they drop to their knees, or something. So you have cases where an assailant was facing the victim, and in the last split second the victim flinches away and gets shot in the back of the head. Makes for a lot of conspiracy theories and jokes about false testimony, but it happens.

There's a famous study on eye-witnesses and perceptions where a group of test subjects are told to watch a short film of a group of people passing a basketball around. They are told to count how many times a person in a white jersey touches the ball. It's not a big court, it's just a small circle of people who start passing the ball and moving around. At the end of the film, the witnesses are asked how many they counted, then asked a couple of other questions, then asked "How many of you saw the gorilla?"

Most don't see that in the middle of the film a man in a gorilla suit walks into the circle, beats his chest, and slowly walks off. He's dressed all in black, like four or five other people in the film, and because everyone is watching those in the white outfits so closely, they don't notice. If you are just watching the film, it's very obvious, but they are focusing on other things.

The same group of researchers do other videos where they have someone stop a stranger in the street and ask for directions on a map. While they are talking someone walks between them with a large package or something that blocks out the view, and the person asking is changed for someone else holding a map but otherwise looking completely different. Most people don't notice the change.

Eyewitnesses are terrible evidence. Some people make excellent eyewitnesses, of course, but you can't tell without other evidence which ones do and which ones don't.