Puzzle Cat and the Rainbow Shield

As creatures often assumed (wrongly) to be color-blind, Puzzle Cat and Kiki saw immediately that there was nothing to Detective Gutterson's flight of "green color" fancy and that there was a much more pragmatic reason why the banners were placed in reversed positions.

 

James, having torn down and scattered the banners in his struggle with Samuel, tried to re-attach the banners, but he suffered from a rare form of color-blindness that did not permit him to distinguish those precise shades (apple-red and leaf-green), despite being able to distinguish other red-green comparisons.

 

What must have cued Puzzle Cat to this solution was the information that the hooded figure in the video had crossed the street while the light was red. Ordinarily, of course, one would (particularly if red-green color-blind) be able to figure out the color of the traffic light from the position, but with vision hampered in a deep mist, he likely was confused.

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Post-script:  Samuel took about six weeks to fully recover from his injuries. James, released on his own recognizance, visited him often in the hospital, begging his forgiveness and recanting his earlier opposition to LGBT political agendas, and in fact subbing for Samuel as administrative assistant on his many important projects.

 

A week before his release from medical care, Samuel told police he would not press charges against James, and two months later they were married in a large public ceremony in a stately University lecture facility (courtesy of Dean Feed). The couple invited many people, including Emmett Sorenson, Karina Crenshaw, and Foster Limehouse. Sorenson and Limehouse disdained even to respond to their invitations, but Karina was in attendance—and that's not entirely unexpected, since she had talked her fundamentalist Christian minister father into flying in from Washington to perform the marriage ceremony