He turned his attention to the chair’s other arm, locked one of the bracelets around it, then slipped his wrist into the remaining open cuff. He was able to snap it shut by nudging it with his leg. Even on the video, you could hear the ratcheting click as the handcuff closed.

He stared into the camera, tears in his eyes, and said four simple words: “This is for you.” Then he scooted backward, rolling the chair to the lip of the pool. The wheels caught on the splash rim around the ridge.

For a moment, it seemed like he might change his mind, and he hesitated there, staring somewhere beyond the camera, but then, with one violent motion, he threw himself backward. The chair tilted and splashed in, although, with the limited perspective of the phone in that position, you couldn’t see exactly what happened after Jon hit the water.

Yesterday, some of our analysts tested a similar chair, thinking that the cushioning would provide enough flotation, but Jon’s weight and the weight of the base of the chair must’ve been enough to drag him under. Whether the chair flipped around, holding him facedown in the water, or sank right away, we’ll never know. We just know that when his body was found, it was at the bottom of the pool, his wrists still cuffed to the arms of the chair.

The video was live-streamed through a link on the anonymous /b/ bulletin board on 4chan, but since no location or identification had been given at the beginning of it, even though it looked real, since it was Halloween night—the perfect time for a hoax like that—some viewers assumed the footage was faked and began a thread of comments, picking apart how tipping an office chair into a pool like that wouldn’t kill you.

The video continued to feed through for the next three hours until someone who’d seen a picture from a dinner party that the senator’s wife had hosted before she died last year recognized the pool, called it in, and officers responded, finding Jon dead in two meters of water.

This morning, I’d watched the first few minutes of the video over and over again, trying to see if there was anything we’d missed. Only on the ninth time through did I notice a reflection on a darkened window from the guest house just beyond the far end of the pool.