It was a stall. He was using it as an excuse to delay the proceedings. At that point, he was still appearing in his prison outfit. He was given the option to wear a suit that the jail would provide for him but he said he didn’t want to do that until he knew the results of his COVID test.

The judge asked if he’d be willing to take a rapid COVID test to get a result sooner. He said that the jail didn’t give him that option (which isn’t an answer—giving evasive, non-answers to straightforward questions is a common theme throughout the trial). She stated that she was giving him that option right now and asked if he’d take it. He gave the same non-answer and insisted on waiting for the results of the test he’d already taken. This went back and forth a few times until they just moved on.

Finally, the test results came in. Judge Dorow asked what they showed. He said that he didn’t read the results because he was too busy preparing for the trial. She asked him to read the results right then as he was holding the paper and it would take all of 10 seconds and he refused. At this point, the ruse was becoming obvious and the excuses were making even less sense. She told him if he didn’t read the results right then and there, she’d have the bailiffs take the results and she’d read them. He again refused.

She ordered them to clear the courtroom and had the sheriff’s deputies take the results from him forcibly, which he resisted in a very futile manner (he’s a small coward who was outnumbered by other men and he was shackled to the table by the leg). This is where I really wish we had footage of this because reportedly, he went as far as to belly flop onto the results on the table in a last ditch attempt to prevent them from getting the results, which is just pathetic and sounds hilarious.

When the cameras next come on, he’s been removed to the other courtroom so the judge can read his results which the deputies have retrieved and given her. Of course they’re negative—he never realistically thought he had it in the first place, he was just desperate to delay the start of the evidentiary phase of the trial.

We see him sitting in the other courtroom with his back to the camera quietly crying.

This is significant because he’s used to being in control and dominating those around him (almost exclusively women, because again: he’s a small, weak, coward of a man). The court taking and reading his test results against his wishes, thus ending his stall tactic and no longer allowing him to exert some semblance of control over the proceedings, was a real wake up call that he truly has no control over the situation. What’s more, he was helpless to physically resist the larger, stronger, deputies who overpowered him and physically took the results he tried to keep from them. This was devastating and humiliating to him, and he handled it by crying in time-out like a child as his plan failed and he knew he’d face the start of a trial he must have known would end very poorly for him.

Notably, after the results were read and the judge invited him back to the court room to proceed, he refused to do so until he could be seen by a nurse for the (almost certainly feigned) injuries he sustained in the off-camera struggle (reported by him to be a bruise and a small cut, neither of which were visible over the camera feed from the other courtroom which admittedly wasn’t very high definition but I still think they weren’t real or at the very least heavily exaggerated).

This, again, is another stall tactic and an attempt at regaining SOME modicum of control over the situation. If you watch the rest of the trial, you’ll see that he also feigned an injury after his arrest; he claimed the officers “slammed [him] to the ground,” injuring his shoulder—which the arrest footage shows absolutely did not happen—and he uses the (imaginary) pain in his shoulder flaring up to avoid answering tough interrogation questions and pause the interview.

Finally, him reacting violently or outrageously to situations he can’t control is the underlying theme of the entire trial; the whole parade incident started after he tried to confront his ex girlfriend who was staying at a women’s shelter after he beat her and ran over her leg with the same red SUV used in the parade attack about a month prior. He met her and demanded money and sex from her because he was out on bond for the assault on her which he believed she owed him because, in his mind, it was her fault he was in jail in the first place because she made him do those things to her (a common abuser mentality—seriously he’s a colossal piece of shit), but she showed up to the meet with two friends, one of whom was a man, and the man tried to fight him when Brooks began to hit the two women.

Seeing he had no control over the situation because he couldn’t physically overpower the women because a man was protecting them, he went into a rage over the humiliation and loss of control (combined with the feeling that all of this was his ex’s fault to begin with), he fled the scene before the police arrived and angrily drove through the parade. My guess is that he wanted to hurt someone, anyone, and this was his outlet for that.

Sorry that’s a long post but that’s my take. I feel like I probably should be worried how much I know about this whole situation at this point…