On the morning after Drakeo the Ruler was stabbed to death at Once Upon a Time in LA, the only on-site employee of the company that rented the festival its metal detectors texted a colleague with a question: would anyone blame the magnetometers?

Andy King, a technician for Event Security Consulting & Operations (ESCO), didn't think so. "The way they were doing artists entry (where our units were)," he wrote on Dec. 19, 2021, cars drove in and a dog sniffed only the outside of each vehicle. Occupants got out, walked through the detector and got back in. "So anything could be hidden in the cars and they're not getting fully swept or searched." Someone could leave a gun in the glove box, clear the magnetometer and pocket it after parking, he wrote. "So blame security — possibly. But there's no way you could pin anything on the mags."

Then he added: "All the guards around me knew who these guys are, their gang affiliations and who they had beefs with."

That text is one of the most striking pieces of evidence in three compendiums filed in Los Angeles Superior Court over the past month. Two were filed by Drakeo's mother, Darrylene Corniel, and his estate. They oppose summary judgment motions from ESCO and from Contemporary Services Corp. (CSC), the crowd-management firm that worked the Coliseum and the stadium then called Banc of California. The third was filed by ESCO in support of its own motion. Together they contain testimony from at least eleven witnesses, including every security vendor at the Dec. 18, 2021 festival, the promoter, the Coliseum's management, and two men who were with Drakeo when he died.

Decibel reported last month on the estate's claim that the festival's vehicle-search procedure made it "virtually impossible" to keep weapons out. The new filings show how that procedure worked in practice, and how each company involved now says someone else was responsible for it.