SOME OF BREEDLOVE'S support team had gone ahead to a Trinidad hotel to prepare for a crew change. Bob's twin brother, Bill, who'd crewed for him on all his races, was grabbing a quick shower when the call came in. Crew chief Bill Magie answered the phone, and then pulled Bill Breedlove out of the stall to tell him there'd been an accident. He didn't repeat the part about Bob not having a pulse. The two sped to the scene, arriving shortly after the ambulance and two Colorado State Patrol cars. Covered by a blanket, Bob's body was still in the road, traffic creeping around him in the other lane.

Magie stopped close to the body. Shirtless, Bill Breedlove pushed past Sergeant Anthony Mattie, the CSP officer in charge of the investigation, and rushed to his brother, yelling, "Oh, God. What the fuck happened? Who hit him? Oh, no. Fuck, no!"

Mattie ordered Magie to move his vehicle, which was blocking traffic. "The traffic can go to hell," Magie said. "That's my best friend and his twin brother laying there."

Another trooper, Jorge Leal, intervened, and the situation escalated into a shouting match. When Leal tried to handcuff him, Magie struggled. Within moments, the 58-year-old

With Bob Breedlove dead in the road, his crew member Bill Magie got in a ½ght with Colorado state troopers, ending with him cuffed inside a patrol car. "The trauma of his body laying there..." Magie recalls. "I didn't need any authority ½gures telling me what I was going to do."

Vietnam vet, plumber, and Episcopal minister was tumbling down an embankment with a cop on his back. He landed with one hand impaled on a barbed-wire fence but still managed to kick Leal in the face, breaking his glasses, before he was cuffed and put in a patrol car.

"I'm not usually like that," Magie says, recalling the day. "The trauma of his body laying there, with a pool of blood streaming across the pavement, it just...

I didn't need any authority figures telling me what I was going to do."

After Magie calmed down, he apologized. Mattie, a 29-year veteran who's seen his share of meltdowns, decided to release him without charges. But Magie is haunted by the possibility that his outburst tainted what followed.

"After that, I don't think they did any real investigation at all," he says. "They hauled the body off, opened the road, and that was it. It was botched, and I can't help but think that my getting them stirred up may have contributed to that."

As it turned out, the ugly brawl was only the first round in a fractious battle between Trinidad authorities and Breedlove's family and friends. The official accident report, compiled by the Colorado State Patrol and accepted by the local district attorney, placed the blame for the crash on Breedlove himself, concluding that he'd careered into the truck's lane, making it impossible for the driver, 15-year-old Joseph Rael, to avoid hitting him. Later that day, in a statement given to officers at the scene, Rael described the bicyclist as "slumped over the handlebars" and weaving into his lane. "He looked like he was past [sic] out," he wrote.

Within weeks, Breedlove's camp started challenging that version of events, launching their own investigation into how Bob died. Led by Bill Breedlove, the family soon found themselves at odds with RAAM officials, whom they considered too quick to accept that Breedlove was at fault; with errant media reports; and most of all, with the law-enforcement officials in charge of investigating the accident.

News articles about the crash suggested that Breedlove had fainted or had a heart attack. RAAM organizer Lon Haldeman, a longtime friend of Breedlove's, told The Des Moines Register that "a farmer in the field" had seen Bob weaving, "and it sounded like it was happening for several hundred feet before the accident." But Haldeman had never talked to the farmer; he says he heard about him from a state trooper who was at the accident scene. No statement from any farmer appears in the accident report, and Sergeant Mattie says the only eyewitnesses he knows about are Rael and his passenger, Michael Ross, 22.

Yet rumors persisted—especially among RAAM buffs who discussed the case online—that Breedlove had somehow gone haywire. "His electrolyte levels were out of whack, perhaps approaching a bonk," one theorized in a posting on RAAM's Web site.

When the Breedloves hired their own private investigators to look into the matter, they didn't find the elusive farmer—or any physiological reason for Bob's supposed collapse. What they did find were facts and possibilities that Trinidad officials apparently never explored. One mystery concerns the forensic evidence at the crash site. The Breedloves' investigators—and, later, an independent accident-reconstruction expert who examined the evidence pro bono for Outside—looked at the same set of clues and concluded that the accident hadn't happened the way state troopers said it did. Both dismissed the official investigation as sloppy and incomplete.

Another question has to do with the high school student driving the truck. Though it was never mentioned during the initial investigation or subsequent hearing, Joseph Rael had been involved in a previous accident on the same stretch of road. Seven months prior to the Breedlove crash and just two miles away, Rael had rolled a Hyundai sedan 60 feet off Highway 12 and left it there. The car had no vehicle identification number, and authorities couldn't determine whether it had been stolen or simply abandoned.

Contacted by a state trooper at school, Rael gave varying accounts of that accident. He claimed he hadn't called the police because he was scared; he and some friends had just been "messing around" with a car that was no good, he said. He also admitted to drinking a beer before driving. He was charged with reckless driving, failing to report an accident, driving without a license, and failing to display proof of insurance. In a routine deal for a first-time offense, all four charges were dismissed by the local DA's office a month before Breedlove's death. Although Rael didn't have a valid driving permit to begin with, his driving privileges were suspended and he was required to take a driver-education course.

The story was disturbing—but, then, so was much of what the Breedloves discovered as they kept digging. Along the way they rattled cages, pursued their own leads, and bumped heads, because, from their standpoint, there was no other choice.

"We're looking for the truth," says Bill Breedlove. "Not only to clear Bob's name but for generations of Breedloves who are going to ask, 'What happened to Uncle Bob, the cyclist?'"