TRENTON -- Someone smashed a San Francisco 49ers fan in the face with a beer bottle after the football team beat the New York Giants on their home turf at MetLife Stadium back in November 2014.



To find out who did it may take more than instant replay.



An off-duty New Jersey state trooper, Steven Hodge, was indicted in the attack last fall -- nearly a year after the incident and two months after the victim, a New York man named Nicholas Guidi, had disorderly conduct charges against him thrown out in municipal court.



Newly released police records provide conflicting accounts of what happened that night, and raise questions about whether the victim identified the trooper or the trooper's brother as the assailant.



NJ Advance Media was given a 19-second video clip and excerpts from police reports after a judge ruled on Friday that the records couldn't be placed under seal.



Prosecutors, meanwhile, are bringing the case back before a grand jury. The trooper's attorney, Robert Ebberup, said the clip could be the thing that exonerates his client.



"That video is a key piece of evidence that the grand jury should have had an opportunity to consider," he told NJ Advance Media.

NJ State Trooper Steven Hodge appears in court with his attorney Robert Ebberup who requested the court dismiss the charges filed against the trooper. Hodge remains suspended without pay after he was indicted on Oct. 30, nearly a year after the attack that left a New York man, Nicholas Guidi, with a broken nose. Hackensack, NJ 6/17/16

But attorneys for Guidi -- who is suing Hodge and the troopers who responded to the scene, claiming they conspired to cover up the attack -- say it doesn't show much of anything. And they claim that even if the trooper didn't attack Guidi, his behavior amounts to "blatant official misconduct."

The shaky, handheld cell phone video taken by the victim's brother, Georgio Guidi, was recorded some time after he was struck in the face with a beer bottle in the stadium parking lot on Nov. 16, 2014.

It shows Nicholas Guidi approach another man in the parking lot as his brother and two women yell for him to come back to their van. A state trooper wrote in a newly uncovered police report that the video shows Nicholas Guidi approach the trooper's brother, identified as Fred Hodge, and spit blood in his face.



As Guidi returns to his own brother, he tells him, "He just (expletive) smashed me in the face with a bottle, bro."

Both parties agree the ordeal started as a dispute between Giants and 49ers fans.

In a police report, State Police Detective Marc Pillus wrote that Guidi said he and his friends were "decked out in 49ers attire" on their way out of the stadium in their van when Guidi threw a beer can out of the window. Hodge and his brother allegedly approached the vehicle and accused Guidi of hitting their pickup truck with the can.



Guidi claims that Steven Hodge flashed his badge and identified himself as a trooper, threatening that he would "choke him the (expletive) out."



The groups parted ways, but at some point somebody approached the van and beat Nicholas Guidi about the face with an empty beer bottle, breaking his nose. Prosecutors, along with Guidi's civil attorneys, claim that attacker was Steven Hodge, a rookie state trooper based at the division's Tuckerton station.



But in police reports obtained by NJ Advance Media, state troopers who investigated the incident cast doubt on that claim, writing that Nicholas Guidi was belligerent and heavily intoxicated and gave indications that the off-duty trooper's brother was his attacker.

They note that the video suggests Guidi identified the man he spit on in the video -- Fred Hodge -- as his attacker, and that Guidi claimed his assailant had accused him of hitting his truck with a beer can. The truck the Hodges were driving that night was registered to Fred Hodge, one report says.

Guidi's attorneys, Brian Schiller and Josh McMahon, dispute the misidentification claim. The police reports also say Guidi was "adamant" in interviews following the attack that his assailant was a member of the statewide force.



Last week, a judge delayed a ruling on Steven Hodge's motion to dismiss the case so that prosecutors, citing "additional evidence," could present it to a second grand jury. The judge also ruled in favor of NJ Advance Media, which had been seeking police records in the case.



The documents obtained by NJ Advance Media were submitted as exhibits in Hodge's motion to dismiss the case, however, and do not tell the whole story. They include just three pages of a 62-page internal State Police report, which included statements from several witnesses. Ebberup, Hodge's defense attorney, said he only submitted passages that were relevant to his filing.



State Police denied an Open Public Records Act request for the full report, citing an exemption for criminal investigatory records.



The reports reference a third-party witness, a limo driver who claimed he saw the attack. Nicholas Guidi told one trooper that the man had corroborated his version of events and confirmed that Steven Hodge struck him with the bottle, according to the documents.

That witness, reached by phone, said he gave a detailed statement to State Police investigators, but declined to comment for this story.

S.P. Sullivan may be reached at ssullivan@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.