By: Crime Reporter
Just mere hours after the Hathian Observer ran our breathless front-page story on the ‘miraculous‘ survival of Nero Milano, saved by surgeon Theo Castillo in a dramatic, hours-long battle in the HGH operating room, a mysterious package has landed on our Editor’s desk. Inside: a note, a USB, and the promise of a very different kind of truth.
‘Loops of Intestines’
The disc contained leaked HPD bodycam footage so graphic it’s hard to stomach. It shows Milano in the middle of a savage knife attack outside Lou’s Bar, where locals say he’s a familiar face. The footage captures him driving a blade deep into a man’s torso, twisting and ripping downward with military precision. Witnesses describe ‘loops of intestine’ spilling onto the pavement as Milano finished the job with chilling calm, even issuing what sounded like a battlefield command over the victim’s lifeless body.
HPD: Quick To Arrive And Quick With The Shot
Witnesses reported that an officer, identified on the footage as Officer Billie Beaman approached with her weapon drawn and started issuing commands to the murderer:
“PUT THE FUCKING KNIFE DOWN!”
Despite repeated commands from Beamen and another fellow officer, identified as one Officer Katz to drop the weapon and get on his knees, Milano instead wiped the blade on his sleeve and calmly slid it into its sheath.
The leak’s anonymous sender wrote to us at the Observer and stated:
Anonymous Leaker: “The man is a murderer and we are lucky that medical staff worked around the clock to save him so justice could be done.”
Seconds after the knife was holstered, Katz fired a single, centre-mass round, bringing Milano to the ground in a spray of arterial blood. Still conscious, Milano spat accusations at the officers:
“You shot me… in cold blood… I would have come voluntarily.”
It appears to the Observer, that perhaps, something was going on between the initial stabbing and Milano’s shooting by the HPD. Perhaps drugs, maybe even these ones from Laveau that have recently made the paper.
The footage finishes with Katz and Beamen clearing the scene, securing the weapon, and calling for an ambulance, not for the disembowelled victim, who was already beyond saving, but for the man they’d just shot.
Irony? Definitely In The Blood
In light of this new evidence, the earlier ‘Bloody Miracle‘ headline now reads like grim irony. The surgeon who ‘refused to let the city claim another soul’ may have, in fact, saved a man whose last act before collapsing was to commit a grisly daylight killing in the heart of Hathian.
The HPD has yet to comment on the leak, the source of the footage, or whether Milano will face murder charges if he survives his still-critical condition.
For a city used to walking the fine line between tragedy and infamy, this may be one of Hathian’s most jarring reversals yet. Clearly as well, the quick turnaround between our publishing the hospital article and the receipt of this USB is no co-incidence. Someone thinks Milano needs to pay more… in reputation at the least.
