It’s early in the morning of Thanksgiving Day, and I feel like I need to say more about yesterday’s post, which I worked on most of Wednesday and finally was able to publish late in the afternoon.

It was a very difficult post to write, and I imagine will make difficult reading, especially on a day when so many people are trying to salvage just a bit of happy from the ongoing pain and isolation this pandemic has forced on us.

But I felt it was important. The documents, which had been scheduled to be unsealed and made public on Monday, didn’t finally become available until Tuesday. Then I had to wade through them, skimming the legal arguments back-and-forth over the proper boundary between a legal and illegal search, between the rights of defendants and the rights of victims and the public. I was looking for anything that would shed some light on what was found during the search. And when I found it, well, it’s not pretty. Where searchers were looking–in drains, filters, pumps, crevasses, mats, faucets, etc–says a lot about what they were searching for.

But there’s more. It shows that the search for justice has been thorough. I hope that Johnny Fraser’s family and friends will get through the difficult moments while reading the post and appreciate the lengths that the FBI has gone through to find the evidence they need to deliver justice in the courtroom when this case finally comes to trial.

It was an awkward time to write and distribute a story like this. Most news media is preparing to essentially shut down for the Thanksgiving weekend, with only a drip of hard news to be delivered until next week. But once these documents were made public, I felt their story needed to be told, without additional delay.

But I think I’ll let the holiday run its course, and hold off on cross-posting it to other media until tomorrow.