There's one key photo in the three that were released this afternoon. It appears to show Officers Brenton and Sweeney's traffic stop just prior to the shooting that took Brenton's life.
According to the image timestamp, it was taken at 9:46PM, just 20 minutes before the crime. As we described on Monday, the two officers had stopped a '94 Infinity near MLK & E. Jefferson at 9:28pm that night. The photo shows what appears to be an Infinity parked in front of the patrol car, on what appears to be the 300 block of MLK, facing southbound.
The suspect vehicle is shown there heading northbound past the traffic stop.
After the traffic stop, the officers drove about two blocks away to 29th & Yesler where they sat and debriefed on the actions taken during the previous stop. Then at 10:06pm a small, 2-door, light-colored vehicle pulled up and opened fire.
Police Chief Pugel has previously described witnesses who reported seeing a suspicious vehicle similar to the suspect vehicle in the area of a traffic stop that night. This image appears to corroborate those reports.
We have an open question to SPD spokesman Mark Jamieson to confirm whether that photo depicts the traffic stop as we described above. Jamieson also couldn't immediately comment on whether this specific image shows the suspect stalking the officer, saying "I don't think [investigators] know. What we're putting out there is that we have an image of this vehicle, and it appears to be the same vehicle in the three different photos. It's unusual to us that you see this car show up several times within a short span of time."
Update: SPD has now confirmed that this image is from the Brenton/Sweeney patrol car prior to the shooting.
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