Look at the timeline of events again a few entries pose a question for me: Alex took a long ass time to call Buster because of various fuckeries he did with Paul’s phone and Rogan, but the way he informed Buster was also unusual, as if he didn’t want to tell Buster and tried to delay as much as possible. Here is the sequence:

• Alex calls Buster for 8 seconds
• Alex calls Brooklyn for 13 seconds, probably because Buster is now talking to Nolen (this call lasted 60 seconds which coincide with the call to Brooklyn)
• Alex calls Tracy White (I assume Brooklyn’s mom) for 14 seconds
• Alex sends group text to the three people in Rock Hills (Buster, Brooklyn, Tracy) to call him back, urgent.
• Then Buster calls Alex for 162 seconds and I assume this is when he got the news.

Alex calling Brooklyn and her mother and trying to involve them in the process sounds to me like he was hoping to pass the news to Buster indirectly, Buster did have to call him back, while he made a lot of direct calls to his brothers. I can only assume that he probably had Nolen (and Rogan) to do the same. Why was he so afraid of telling Buster who was absolutely the person who needed the hear the news first? I get that he may be afraid to upset his son. But that is exactly what I want to examine as well, psychologically speaking. This pattern of behaviours is also pretty consistent with the way father and son talked on the phone, direct message is rarely, if ever, communicated clearly. Was he afraid that Buster can see through the web of lies he tried to weave that very moment? After all who had more insight in the family at that very moment?

What’s weird about it is how Buster recounted that sequence of event in his testimony. He said that Alex called him in and told him the news, while it was him that called Alex back after the ruckus was raised by Alex. Buster did “massage” his testimony a bit by saying that he didn’t remember exactly how that night went, reasonable considering what he went through. But that version Buster recounted would have made Alex look better, because the prosecution did drill Alex on why he took so long to call Buster, and had they drilled the round about way he told Buster, would have made him look even worse, because one of the narrative of the prosecution was that Buster understood who killed his family and didn’t feel the need to be protected, and the way Alex avoided a confrontation with Buster would have made that pretty clear. I think they avoided going into that angle because it would have caused unnecessary cross examination on Buster and upset the jury.