On June 27, less than a week after the shooting, according to court records, Brandon Miller sent Adams a text message.

“We need to team up end this beef stuff bro,” Miller wrote. “There’s so much we could do together. You need to consider. We can create our own spring break location and make bread for life just off that. Then do events nationwide year round and merch. We need to work together my dude I’m telling you now!”

“Well look dude you know what has to happen if you want a piece of the pie,” Adams responded. “Otherwise I’ll just keep it pushing. Having a little of something big is way better than having a lot of nothing.”

“I mean I’ll do my own thing and be just fine. I obviously am organized and got shit poppin,” Miller said. “Was trying to include you to be even bigger but I’ve been doing great lately.”

“Good for u man,” Adams said. “Wish u the best. But ya you know how to get me included.”

What seemed like a sly attempt at going behind the back of the Deyo brothers was, in reality, an attempt by Miller to try and get Adams to admit to the crime. “[I wanted] to see what was going to be said, so I know that if my buddy got shot, and I could get him to maybe say something about doing that, then it could hold up in court,” Miller later testified. “That’s kind of what I was doing, is just to see, like, what I could get him to admit basically.”

Meanwhile, the Cedar Rapids Police Department (CRPD), which declined to comment for this story, was investigating the case. In July, officers brought Adams into the station for questioning. The police station is next-door to the city’s amphitheater, and in a video clip of the interview submitted during the subsequent trial, you can faintly hear the alt-rock band Lifehouse doing their sound check. Adams, clad in a gray T-shirt and black-rimmed glasses, sat for an hour across from two veteran CRPD detectives, Martin Devore and George Aboud. His arms were folded pensively on the table in front of him.

During the interview, Adams admitted to wanting the domain name “at one point” and to driving Hopkins and “Dirty Dave” Davis to Target and deciding not to park in the store’s parking lot. But he denied knowing Davis was buying burner phones. When asked for his email address, Adams wrote the address on the piece of paper at the crime scene — RJ_Mr_Adams123@yahoo.com — but conveniently omitted the “123.” It was all suspicious, but no charges were pressed, and Adams was released.

For the rest of 2017, and into 2018, Adams went about his business as if nothing had happened. State Snaps was continuing to grow, its follower count now firmly in the millions. Adams was posting new content daily, trying to keep his brand on the rise.

By this time, Adams had been contacted by Taylor Jonathan, the owner of Soar Social, a social media management, targeted marketing, and content creation company based out of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. (A successful enterprise, Soar Social had even been hired by Corey Lewandowski, President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, to promote a stop on his book tour.)

Like Matt Shearer before him, Jonathan saw massive potential in Adams’ brand, and wanted to partner up to throw parties presented by, and advertised through, State Snaps. His pitch to Adams was simple: “You are showing a party to a party crowd,” Jonathan told me. “Why not give them a party to attend?”

Starting in September 2017 — with Hopkins in jail, Adams not yet charged, and Deyo recovering from his injuries — Jonathan began organizing and hosting massive State Snaps events through his event coordination company Party Monster in New York, Raleigh, and Charleston. Adams and Jonathan had a handshake agreement to split profits, though Jonathan declined to disclose how much money those events generated.

In March 2018, the two traveled to Rosarito, Mexico, for a party. Videos of the event posted to the Party Monster Instagram account depict a raucous scene: hundreds of young people dancing wildly, music blasting and lights ablaze, with women in bikinis shaking their butts onstage while Jonathan hypes the crowd in a State Snaps jersey. Adams, Jonathan said, largely played it cool, and never got in the middle of the action. “He never acted stupid or out of line,” Jonathan told me. “His mind was always on the social presence of the brand.”

The events solidified State Snaps as a real-life experience. “We translated a slogan, a mindset, into a real-life trend,” Jonathan said. “At one event in Canada, I doused a girl in maple syrup, and she got ‘Do It For State’ tattooed on her butt cheek the next day. You can’t do that by just posting stuff online.”

Though Jonathan saw no promise in routing a business through a website in 2019, Adams had purchased DoIt4State.com, with the numeral 4, instead of “for,” as a landing page for all of their events. They used the site to sell merchandise, which grew from simple jerseys and T-shirts to hats, sweatshirts, tank tops, and even women’s thongs. The Instagram account broke 1.5 million followers, and the team, according to financial records submitted into evidence at the trial, raked in over $100,000 during the last three months of 2018 alone.

Adams was living the State Snaps fever dream: minimal responsibilities, minimal consequences, 100% indulgence. He had succeeded beyond his expectations. “Money really make me feel like I can be somebody,” he had once posted on Twitter. And now he really was somebody. Ironically enough, it didn’t seem like Adams needed the Deyos’ domain name after all.

But far from the glitz and festivities of State Snaps, the gears of the legal system ground on: Hopkins was talking. He pled guilty to his charges and, after being sentenced to 20 years in prison in June 2018, agreed to give up his cousin in exchange for a reduced sentence. He laid out the scheme in full and agreed to testify at trial.

That September, Adams was driving to his younger brother’s football game at a local stadium when he was pulled over by the CRPD. He was arrested for his role in the extortion of Ethan Deyo. He called his mother from the police station.

He was the same loving and caring son she had known him to be his whole life. “Just be calm. They are just doing their job. I haven’t done anything wrong,” Gladys recalled her son telling her. She was racing to the police station, but he told her to go back to the field. “You need to watch his game,” he said. “This is his moment.” He was released from custody shortly thereafter and a trial date was set for April 15, 2019.