This link has another good video showing both tents. (timestamp 0:31)
California father's killing at campsite leads to investigations into 7 past shootings - CNN
Did the entrances to the tents face each other? I am assuming they did. I am trying to figure out the BIL's vantage point upon hearing the shot.
Thanks. That clarifies a great deal. Those tents were facing one another. They are placed to optimize shade. They might be different years of the same tent: one seems to have taller walls than the other, but this might be an optical trick from the shadow or a different use of color. They are the same length and have barrel roofs.
Now I see that the cars aren't parked near the picnic table. The two Dads can't have been afraid, otherwise they would have put the cars in the spots nearer the tents.
I wonder if they had visitors before they went to bed, thus the empty spots? Alternatively—and maybe the simpler and therefore more likely explanation—the cars signified the space wasn't vacant: someone with no reservation couldn't have claimed it late at night.
Interesting that a drone must have been used to take the photo....this is getting more common in law enforcement, search and rescue, etc.
I can't make out 2 extra adult chairs in that photo. I see kid's chairs. Maybe the little ones were too young for that kind of chair?
Also, now that I see layout, we could re-visit the idea that the empty parking spot was used so the toddlers could run around without getting all dusty. That spot was in plain view of the adult chairs, so the kids would have been heavily supervised. In other words, there may have been several reasons for the 2 cars to be parked where they are, no reasons mutually exclusive.
If the victim's tent is the one on the right, the BIL's tent was in a direction that the shot could have been fired from? It also could have been fired at from the loop road presumably. With no cars in the parking spot, there was a clear path for the bullet. No way that's an accident. With the fly on, the walls of that tent would have been quite visible many nights of the month because they're light.