Here’s the part of Prince’s story that still refuses to sit quietly: the cameras inside Paisley Park went dark in the final stretch of his life, and the silence they left behind has never quite stopped echoing. I’ve spent enough time around security rooms and studio hallways to know that systems don’t usually fail like that. They fail messily—glitches, static, technicians shrugging at cables. This wasn’t that. According to logs and people who were there, the cameras went down one by one, as if someone was walking the grid and flipping switches. In a house built to watch, the watching stopped.

You’ve heard the outline. The 48-hour blackout. The small circle with access. The sister—Taika Nelson—staring into television lights and saying words that forced a second look: someone was in the house that night, and the cameras were off. She didn’t shout. She didn’t dramatize. She asked the kind of questions families ask when official language feels too clean for what actually happened. The medical conclusion stands—we all know that piece—but the context never did settle. It hovered.

Paisley Park wasn’t just a residence. It was a fortress designed by a man who stopped trusting the industry long before the industry admitted he had a point. By the mid-2010s, the surveillance setup was thorough: entries, corridors, studio thresholds, exterior doors, the paths he used most. Not for vanity. For safety. The people with permissions were few—Prince, his closest aide (Kirk Johnson), the primary technician, and one elevated access holder who never made it into the public paperwork. Four keys to the kingdom. That’s not a conspiracy; that’s a standard high-security roster. But when your system goes blind, four keys become four questions.

The timeline reads like a slow unwinding. April 14, the emergency landing. A near-miss by paramedics’ measure. He returns to Paisley Park and a hallway camera flickers—the kind of blip you only notice in hindsight. Two days later, a new face appears inside his schedule, moving with authority that felt borrowed from somewhere other than trust. Not introduced, not explained, yet suddenly deciding which appointments mattered and which didn’t. In homes like this, access is a language. If you speak it without earning it, everyone hears the wrong accent.

By April 18, one feed goes fully black. Not frozen. Dead. Prince looks at the monitor and says, softly, “Someone’s been in here.” That line sits in the gut. It’s not an accusation; it’s recognition. Whether from fatigue or fear, he delays the fix. You can read that any way you want. I read it as a man exhausted by the friction between vigilance and vulnerability. When the system you rely on becomes a question, confidence thins.

The next day, a critical corridor loses its eyes—the studio path, the nightly route between rehearsal rooms and the vault. If you know his habits, you understand the weight of that loss. A technician offers to come in. A call cancels it, allegedly in his name. He never confirms the cancellation himself. That detail isn’t a smoking gun, but it is what seasoned reporters flag and underline. If a system needs hands-on inspection, and someone blocks the hands, you ask why. You keep asking.

April 20, 11:40 p.m., an entry at the East Side service door using a temporary card none of the long-term staff can place. The cameras along that corridor—already dark. The visitor spends roughly 28 minutes inside. Only the exit registers, courtesy of one stubborn exterior camera. No face, no silhouette, just a timestamp. If you’ve ever tried to reconstruct a scene from blanks, you know how much weight a timestamp can carry when it’s all you have.

By morning, April 21, the house is blind. First responders ask for footage; staff walk them to a control room that might as well be a chapel to absence. Every screen: black. Not static. Not error messages. Just nothing. In an ordinary property, you call this sabotage too quickly and embarrass yourself later. In this property, with this artist and this week, “deliberate” stops being inflammatory and starts sounding like the only word that fits.

The names orbiting those days are familiar if you’ve followed the case. Kirk Johnson, a friend and gatekeeper with unusual latitude across rooms and systems. A doctor, Michael Schulenberg, who admitted to writing a prescription in Kirk’s name rather than Prince’s—in the name of privacy, in the language of enforcement, a fine. Visits that don’t all land in the logs. Corridors that go dark before medical checks would’ve left a trail. None of this has been proven to be part of anything more than bad timing and worse judgment. But journalism is partly about the way patterns make your neck hairs stand up even when your mouth refuses to overstate them.

Then there’s the stranger—call him a scheduler, call him a handler, call him a question mark. He shows up on the internal calendar, makes decisions that typically required direct approval, moves like he’s been deputized by an authority no one can name. The family doesn’t recognize him. Prince doesn’t publicly introduce him. He’s inside the building the night the card reader logs that late entry. If you’re searching for neat villains, this story doesn’t hand you one. It gives you a ghost with paperwork and 28 minutes.

And trailing behind all of it is the elevated technician—the special-level contractor. Not staff. Not family. Writes like a footnote in the official record, except the permissions suggest a chapter. Advanced override capability. Ability to mask signatures, silence feeds, alter logs. The kind of access designed for solving problems quickly and invisibly. The kind of access that, in the wrong hands, can make problems vanish—along with their history. His name stays sealed. That doesn’t make him guilty. It does make him interesting.

Fans have built entire cities out of these cul-de-sacs—money motives, catalog control, unreleased masters, probate machinery grinding through art. Some theories are sloppy; some are careful; most are born out of love and a refusal to let the narrative harden too fast. The truth the papers settled on holds: accidental overdose. But the human truth doesn’t lay down so easily. He was isolated. He was guarding an empire of sound he considered sacred. He was firing people, narrowing circles, listening for danger in the quiet places. If you tell me the cameras died at random, I’ll nod at the official line and still keep my file open.

Taika’s interview changed the temperature. Not because it accused, but because it refused to soothe. “Someone shut them off,” she said. “And somebody knows why.” It’s the kind of sentence lawyers dislike and citizens recognize. Institutions prefer closure. Families live with contradiction. She didn’t escalate. She didn’t feed the frenzy. She held the questions steady, as if the steadiness itself was an act of respect.

What do we do with this now, years removed? We resist the urge to spin a myth where evidence won’t go. We also resist the comfort of easy endpoints. If cameras were shut down intentionally in a home designed to watch, that decision is part of the story, whether or not it changes the cause of death. If access was granted to people without clear lines of trust, that’s part of the story too. When legacy meets machinery—estate battles, valuations, licensing—the noise rises, and the person at the center gets quieter. In that quiet, small technical choices matter more than press releases.

Here’s my read, as a reporter who has stared at too many blank monitors and listened to too many families balance grief against paperwork: the blackout is not proof of foul play. It is proof of vulnerability at a moment when vulnerability had consequences. It is a doorway to questions that deserved better answers than we got. And it is a reminder that control—over music, over privacy, over the story—was the thing Prince chased hard enough to build a fortress around it. In the final days, the fortress lost power.

The ache in Taika’s voice isn’t the sound of conspiracy. It’s the sound of someone who knows the difference between a glitch and a decision. The official files can close. The human questions keep walking the halls. If there’s one truth we can carry without distorting it, it’s this: the silence inside Paisley Park wasn’t just the absence of footage. It was the presence of choices. And someone, somewhere, knows exactly which choices were made.