TONY BECKER isn't so sure. Shortly after Rael's sentencing, the Breedloves hired Becker Consulting, an accident-reconstruction firm based in Normal, Illinois, to perform a crash study. A former police officer and deputy coroner, Becker, 47, has been doing such studies for more than 20 years. During a trip to the accident site in November 2005, he took measurements at the scene, then analyzed the troopers' photos and taped together the pieces of Bob's bike (which had been returned to the family) in an effort to determine the path of impact. He didn't have access to the truck.

Becker was intrigued by several discrepancies in the accident report. For example, one trooper stated that Rael had told him he first saw the bicyclist in the eastbound lane, while another reported that Rael first saw him in the westbound lane. He was troubled that so much of the physical evidence had been moved or obliterated and that no scuff marks or paint-to-pavement transfers from the bicycle were found in the reputed debris path. But most of all, he was baffled by the CSP's declaration that the point of impact was six feet from the north edge of the highway. For Breedlove to get in the path of the truck at that point, he would have had to sail across both lanes to catch the left front of the truck as it was already skidding off the road.

The major damage to the bicycle, Becker discovered, had occurred from the front tire to the front fork; the rear tire hadn't even been deflated. The damage to the truck was distributed along a straight line on the driver's side, from the front bumper to the base of the windshield, with several contact areas along the way, including a broken antenna. If Breedlove had been weaving erratically across the path of the truck, the damage to both vehicles would have been quite different—and there would have been massive damage to the right side of Breedlove's body. But most of the injuries were on his left side. To Becker, a soft-spoken, methodical investigator, the physical evidence was thoroughly consistent with a head-on collision with the truck's front left corner.

A head-on doesn't fit with the account of Breedlove weaving on the road, Becker insists, and it couldn't have occurred at the point of impact that the official report indicated. If the collision had been that close to the edge of the road, you'd expect to find the body in the ditch, where the truck came to rest, not in the opposite lane. "If it happened anywhere along those skid marks, common sense and physics tells you the body is going to move in the direction the truck's moving," Becker says.

Becker went further. What if the skid marks didn't belong to the truck at all? Two of the troopers had seen the bicycle lying on the south edge of the road, adjacent to Bob's lane, when they first arrived at the scene. If bike and body ended up on that side of the road, Becker argues, it's possible that the accident had occurred in the bicyclist's lane.

But there are problems with that scenario, too. Three witnesses who arrived before the troopers say the bicycle was in the truck's lane at that point. Armstrong, the state patrol's reconstruction expert, insists that he measured the width of the skid and matched it to the Chevy tires—even though there's no mention of that detail in his report.

Nonetheless, Becker's central assertion—that the official point of impact is in error—has been seconded by an independent accident-reconstruction expert consulted by Outside: John Smith, of Raymond Smith and Associates, a firm in Parker, Colorado.

"Let's start with what we know is true," says Smith, 45, who reviewed the investigation file and photos as well as Becker's report. "The story that the bicycle is weaving all over the place doesn't make any sense."

Smith has reconstructed more than 1,500 collisions. Like Becker, he believes the damage to the truck and the bike reflects an in-line collision. Although Breedlove was hurled to the left of the truck, Smith doubts the body would have enough lateral velocity to propel it halfway across the highway from the indicated point of impact. Because so much evidence was either moved or never located, he says, it's possible the collision occurred earlier in the skid or even before the skid began. "It's hard to explain how the body got that far from the truck," he says.

A colonel in the Army Reserve whose father was a state trooper, Smith is witheringly critical of the CSP's investigation. The troopers didn't have enough evidence, he insists, to place the impact where they did. If they didn't find even a scuff mark on the road at the point where the bike supposedly hit the truck, or other marks to indicate where the body first hit the pavement, it may have been because they were looking in the wrong place. They failed to interview key witnesses and failed to adequately assess Rael's previous driving record. The evident sympathy for the 15-year-old driver in Mattie's report ("it was clear and obvious that the younger boy who identified himself as the driver was very emotional") might seem commendable, but to Smith it suggests a bias in favor of the local motorist and against Breedlove and his combative supporters.

"This was a very, very poor investigation," Smith says. "I get the feeling they were particularly careless. I'd say he got hometowned."

The CSP's Armstrong says his calculations reflect an "area of impact" rather than a precise location, working from the point where the truck came to rest in the grass—established by mounds of dirt plowed by the skidding tires—and the body's position. Given the differences in mass and velocity, he suggests, it's possible a head-on collision could result in the body ending up on one side of the road and the truck on the other.

"The evidence is the evidence," Armstrong declares. "He could have landed on the centerline and rolled to where he was."

Mattie says the laws of physics don't allow for the accident to have occurred in the bicyclist's lane, before the skid begins in the truck's lane. "The kid did everything that was in his power to do," he says. "He attempted to reduce his speed. He tried to surrender his position on the road by moving to his right. The only thing he did wrong was be there. He shouldn't have been driving. But the circumstances would be no different if you had a carload of nuns in that vehicle."