The bankruptcy trial may have wrapped up last week, but the biggest open question in Shilo Sanders’ case is still hanging out there, and it isn’t about anything either side said on the stand. It’s about a video nobody can find.
“It just appears real obvious that there is some missing video that no one seems to have been able to find,” Judge Michael E. Romero said during the trial. That missing footage sits at the center of whether Sanders keeps the $11.89 million bankruptcy debt he owes John Darjean, the former school security guard he fought with back in 2015.
What the Missing Video Allegedly Shows
Only two camera angles from that day have ever surfaced, both published by TMZ back in 2016. One catches the very start of the encounter from inside the school gym. The other shows the tail end of it, a blurry shot from the lobby with Sanders barely visible in the corner.
Neither one captures the actual altercation, the several seconds in between where Darjean says Sanders struck him and Sanders says he was the one being choked.
That’s where the third angle comes in. Two school employees testified they saw a more complete video from a camera with a wider view of the gym and lobby. Administrator Lynn Gray described watching Sanders strike Darjean, calling it a “boom, boom” she couldn’t quite identify as a fist, forearm, or elbow.
Dana Hamilton, an attorney who investigated the incident for the school, said the footage showed “a constant struggle,” with Darjean holding on as Sanders moved around, ending with his elbow striking Darjean in the chest. Hamilton later put that finding in writing to Darjean directly, telling him the video backed up his account.
Deion Sanders’ Own Words About the Video
Deion Sanders didn’t testify at this bankruptcy trial, but he addressed the video years ago in a deposition tied to Darjean’s original lawsuit. He said the school’s head of security refused to hand it over, so he went around him.
“They manipulated and gave us the video,” Sanders testified. “It’s not like the school provided the video for us.”
He said he couldn’t recall the man’s name, only that he was a coach at the school who was later terminated. Darjean tells a different version, pointing to an IT worker named Erin Holmes, who he says gave a statement claiming she mistakenly erased footage from that day. Holmes’ name came up again during the Denver trial as one of the few staffers with access to the cameras. She didn’t respond to a request for comment.
With the third angle gone, the trial leaned on the two surviving clips and witness memory instead. Judge Romero isn’t required to solve the mystery of where the footage went, only to weigh what’s left of it.
He’s given both sides until November to file written arguments before he rules, closing the trial with a line that summed up the whole ordeal well enough on its own: he’d be “dreaming of those videos” until then.