Chapter 2 - The University’s Cover-Up and the Missing Footage
By Friday morning, the anger burning in my chest had hardened into ice-cold tactical precision. I left Lily in the capable hands of her aunt at the hospital and drove straight to Bradley University’s main campus in Peoria. The rain had cleared, leaving behind a slick, gray morning that matched the grim determination in my soul.
I marched directly into the office of the Dean of Students, a slick, impeccably tailored man named Harrison Vance, who looked more like a corporate lobbyist than an educator. I expected tears, outrage, and promises of a thorough campus-wide manhunt. Instead, I was met with bureaucratic stone-walling and thinly veiled hostility.
“Mr. Mercer, we are, of course, deeply saddened by what happened to Lily,” Dean Vance said smoothly, folding his manicured hands over his mahogany desk. “However, the university takes these matters of nighttime safety very seriously, and our preliminary review indicates that Lily may have simply slipped on the wet stone steps outside the science hall.”
I slammed my palms down on his desk, leaning in so hard that Vance flinched backward in his leather chair. “Slipped? Are you insane, Vance? Her jaw is fractured in six places! That isn't a slip and fall! That is a brutal, targeted assault!”
“Please keep your voice down, Mr. Mercer,” Vance replied, his tone chillingly dismissive. “The campus police have already filed an initial incident report. There are no witnesses, no active security footage of the courtyard due to routine maintenance upgrades, and frankly, pushing a sensationalized narrative will only bring unwanted, negative publicity to the university during donor weekend. We suggest you let the matter rest while Lily recovers.”
My blood ran cold. No security footage? Routine maintenance upgrades? That courtyard was monitored by four high-definition dome cameras that fed directly into campus security headquarters. They weren't broken. They were hiding something.
Leaving the administration building, I didn't head home. I headed straight for the campus security annex. Using my old military intelligence background and a hundred-dollar bill slipped to a sympathetic night-shift dispatcher named Toby, I gained access to the unedited server logs from Thursday night.
May you like
What I found on those digital logs made my stomach churn. The security cameras had recorded the attack. They showed a group of three fraternity members—led by Chad Sterling, the untouchable star quarterback and son of the university’s largest financial donor—cornering Lily behind the science building. They showed Chad striking her across the face when she refused to hand over her backpack containing her university ethics research notes. And most damning of all, the logs proved that Dean Vance’s office had accessed, downloaded, and systematically deleted the master video files at 3:00 AM, hours before I even arrived at the hospital.
Bradley University wasn’t just negligent. They were actively conspiring to cover up a felony assault to protect a golden-boy donor baby.
