What has emerged, then, is a pair of irreconcilable narratives about the death of Gray — but a trial, by nature, tends to emphasize one. The prosecution crafts a detailed story about what may have happened, leaving the defense to respond in ­pieces along the way. But there is another complex narrative for the defense, another timeline to explain Gray’s death, which is endorsed by just about every cop in the city and many of the prosecutors who have left Mosby’s office. I find that narrative underwhelming for several reasons, one of which is that I believe the medical examiner’s conclusion that Gray’s injuries suggest homicide. It’s nevertheless useful to consider the alternate story, so I’ll try to present it as nearly as I can.

Imagine the scene for a moment. Here is Freddie Gray. He’s standing on the corner in a pair of bluejeans and a light jacket over a black Lacoste T-shirt. Let’s say he’s holding a few pills of dope, or let’s just say he’s selling them, when a pair of cops roll up on bicycles and Gray takes off.

Probably at this point the cops should let him go, because really, who cares? Veteran officers know that the city is awash in violent crime and that mucking around with Gray over a dope collar amounts to nothing. But these are cops on an enforcement detail, under pressure to make arrests, so we have a pursuit, and pretty soon, they have Gray down. But when they search his pockets, they can’t find the pills. No surprise. Any suspect on the run is going to consider tossing his dope or swallowing it, and it seems as if Gray ate his. His toxicology report will eventually come back with traces of opioids in his blood, and even the cops will admit that Gray wasn’t a junkie or a user. In fact, some of them will tell you that he worked with them as an informant and that they wish the flex squad had left him alone. “When I catch somebody and I can’t find the drugs, I’m like: ‘All right. You win today. I’ll get you tomorrow,’ ” a cop who worked with Gray told me. “But those young guys, those bike cops, honestly they’re kind of looking for numbers.”’

So now the police call for a wagon, and when it comes, they hoist Gray in. At this point, he’s crying out in pain and clearly dragging his legs. Any normal citizen watching the video is going to say the only humane thing to do is call for medical help, but plenty of cops see it differently. They’ll tell you that people fake injuries all the time, and not only fake them but deliberately incur them to avoid jail. “I’ve seen it hundreds of times, guys banging their head on the cellblock wall or the door or just thrashing around to injure themselves,” one cop told me. In any case, Gray goes into the van with handcuffs and shackles, but no one puts his seatbelt on. That may seem negligent, but cops say it was completely normal; that if you get close enough to strap someone in, there’s a chance he’ll strike out. “Their knees are literally touching the center wall, so you would have to crawl across their waist to buckle them in,” a longtime officer told me. “So if he’s sitting on the right side of the van, you’re going to have to lean over him with your gun side basically sticking in his stomach, and you’re at his mercy. Even though he’s handcuffed, he can bite you, he can knee you, he can head-butt you.” The cop with three decades of experience told me, “I never saw one single guy seat­belted, ever, before Freddie Gray.”

So the van takes off with Gray shackled and possibly injured, loose in the back without a seatbelt. Next you have the “rough ride.” There’s been a lot of talk about this: cops driving fast around corners and making sudden stops with suspects in the van. Nobody on the police force will say this never happened. It’s a point of fact in Baltimore, especially in decades past, and any good cop will tell you that giving somebody a rough ride should be grounds for disciplinary action. But a lot of cops don’t believe that it happened to Gray. Think about the dynamic, they say. These are a couple of cops on bicycles calling for a wagon. The driver doesn’t care about them. “They’re just here to pick up your guy, search him, take him to central booking, drop him off,” one cop said. “There’s no camaraderie, like, ‘Oh, we’re going to get him for you.’ That’s not going to happen.”

Maybe the van driver has his own agenda, or maybe Gray is simply in the back of a wagon bouncing through the cratered streets of West Baltimore. Either way, by the time he comes out, he’s in critical condition. We know from the autopsy that the way he was dragging his legs wasn’t substantiated by any known injury. Cops will tell you that after faking a medical calamity, Gray gave himself a real one inside the wagon.

And that’s your basic police narrative. Call it the case for the defense. If you find it convoluted and improbable compared with the simple explanation that the police roughed him up and bounced him around until he died, then the question becomes, If the prosecution’s story is so obvious, why was it so hard to convict? One member of the hung jury told me that, although she is a black woman from the city who appreciates the problem of police brutality, “11 out of 12 of us felt like the prosecution should have done a better job, and some of us are individuals who were for conviction.”