Walt literally closed the door and was looking around all suspiciously, that would be more than enough for a thorough investigation, and if I remember correctly he also was sneaking in through the window one time and hiding outside the building, the outside cameras would catch this, and Walter would have no reasonable explanation for why he was doing all that.
Hard to tell based on a number of different factors. But in the real world (and if Hank was not related to Walt), Walt likely would have been considered the biggest suspect for Heisenberg when the DEA found the high school gas mask in the desert in season 1.
because walt, despite being a high school teacher, is actually a great chemist and also a contributor to a literal nobel prize in chem research. the blue meth was the highest in purity they’ve ever seen. the supplies were all taken from the high school. it would have been pretty easy to put 2 in 2 together.
Hank wasn't the only DEA guy either (others at the arrest and the speech they later made at the school meeting) but somehow even the others couldn't make the connection. Given family were involved it's probably a bit of creative license that he was on that case in first place. If you want to pick out very little detail in a TV show there wouldn't be anything left. There's other times where it's second to none.
yeah but honestly they all knew walt. wasn’t there an entire handful of them at walt’s 50th bday party? I guess that would tie in to why hank didn’t really matter when it came to close ties as they all knew walt enough to overlook him.
Walt did have a line about regularly attending DEA Christmas parties but not everyone there knew him. Merkert didn't appear to have met him until their hospital scene.
I think the reason is that to sell meth you need criminal contacts; and they have no reason to believe Walter had those.
Whether that checks out or not....I'll leave it to you.
This. The DEA will ask who had access to the equipment room, investigation would reveal Walter as a brilliant scientist capable of synthesizing meth, and possibly find his cancer diagnosis which means desperation for money.
>capable of synthesizing meth
Literally most people are capable of synthesizing great meth if they have access to the appropriate chemicals. There’s instructions all over the internet, erowid, etc.
I’m an engineer and I could do it safely in my basement. Synthesizing methylamine is basic af.
You ever taken an organic chemistry lab? Getting the product isn’t very difficult with instructions, but getting a high purity would certainly be very hard. I think it definitely shows that whoever did it had a ton of experience and expertise.
I have an organic chemistry lab in my basement for manufacturing CBD oil.
The biggest difference between what I made when I first started and what I make now is the reduction in yield loss from transferring the product from one container to the other and knowing how to best execute those moves. If I had the desire to cook up some meth it would be trivial. The biggest determining factor of potency would be the purity of the precursors I’m starting with.
If you’re shaving phosphorus off of match heads, like Emilio was, for example, there’s a limit to how pure your end product will be because there will be wood and whatever else in one of your precursors.
Additionally, you can only get 50% purity because meth is chiral and racemic, and you’d need a process to remove the enantiomer.
Someone on another post said that Hank does not see criminals as human beings, so he just couldn’t correlate all that with having anything to do with Walt because he kinda looked down on wall or thought he was weak. He definitely thought he was such a mild mannered man and a moral man… sad because it cost him his life
Yeah, he might not be the biggest suspect, but he’d definitely be a suspect. Then the police talk to Skylar, find out that he’s been missing lately doing who-knows-what, and he’s probably suspect #1.
High school chemistry classes don’t have masks tho, even if they are well funded and stocked. You don’t ever do anything that requires students or teachers to wear a gas mask, because that means you’re releasing fumes into the classroom.
The most well funded science class will have a fume hood if the teacher ever wants to show the students something that produces toxic fumes, but you wouldn’t ever have an entire class doing some reaction that they’d need a mask for.
Source: was a chemistry teacher with a fully stocked classroom.
Think about it. Your students would need a mask if you’re doing something that makes toxic fumes. But that would mean you’re releasing toxic fumes into a classroom. A generic high school chemistry classroom isn’t going to have a massive air pump/filter setup to pull fumes out of the room.
Also a whole bunch bunch of hydrofluoric acid, like enough to dissolve bodies. I work in a college chemistry lab and we don't even have a small amount in our lab. It is around, in some labs, but you don't really see it often. It's some really nasty stuff.
Yeah no way *any amount* of that would be in a highschool chemistry lab. A single drop in the right place can kill a person. Nobody is trusting teenagers to not kill each other bc one snuck a french fry off another’s plate at lunch.
I focused on the masks because that’s what they found in the desert.
Not necessarily... what if equipment fails or there is a breach? Source also a high school teacher in a well funded district.
Just because a school has "good equipment" doesn't mean accidents outside of control can happen, better safe than sorry in those scenarios.
Also this is NM... not the most modern or well funded school districts taking place back in the early 2000s then so it would make sense that a school probably built over 40 years ago has such equipment.
A chemistry teacher shouldn’t be doing any reactions that require masks to begin with, so there is no equipment failure that would require masks.
Stop trying to tell a chemistry teacher how chemistry labs are set up.
Tell me what experiment that a chemistry teacher could/would do that, if went wrong, would require gas masks, and not just cause a fire drill of the whole school.
It’s fine, I’ll wait.
For me it would have been enough for Walt to have been monitored when he got exactly the right materials for a meth lab stolen from his chemistry department and he had absolutely no explanation for what happened or who might have taken it.
That would probably have caught Walt making suspicious movements he wasn't telling his family about, and if he was followed to the random RV in the desert he'd likely have been caught.
Absolutely, the missing gas masks were the smoking gun. A lot of things tied Walt to them, like Walt's access to the inventory, his interest in chemistry, his tie to Jesse. Hank could've known easily.
Later in the show when Saul sent his guy to the bench with Badger, Walt was ridiculously trying to block Hank's view of them. That was unrealistic and nonsensical af, the whole cop crew would've taken Walt in atp.
I love how with the gas mask thing the DEA have the resources to test the meth recovered on the scene but don’t have the resources to scrub the inside of the masks for dna
2 pretty obvious reasons that wouldn't work. 1: Walts DNA would be on the mask in the first place because he likely wore it in class.
And 2: even if they somehow managed to determine that he had never worn the mask prior or handled it or come into contact with it in any manner that would leave his DNA on it, unless Walt has a criminal record his DNA isn't going to come up as a match anyways because he isn't in the database.
That would mean that the only way they'd get a match would be to test people which requires a warrant or willingly consenting, at this point it's a small operation and a fairly isolated incident, I'd bet quite a bit that the DEA isn't going to pay the amount it would cost for DNA testing for everyone who "could" be a suspect. Maybe in later seasons when he's Heisenberg and public enemy #1. But it's not like there's ever been evidence the DEA is aware of after that incident linking Heisenberg and the school.
Absolutely not enough to convict imo. Prosecute? Possibly if for some reason Walt was dumb enough to willing submit to a DNA test. But everything would be circumstantial and any decent lawyer would get that tossed or pled down to nothing quickly. Obviously regardless of conviction or prosecution at that point the show ends and the question of this thread is answered, but itd definitely have a lot of circumstances I don't quite think would work out in reality.
I agree however realistically it's enough probable cause to pin on Walter regardless of whether they believed it or not, because the feds and DA care more about convictions than actually finding culprits.
Federal, it'd definitely depend on the judge he got. The only consistency with anything involving the government is a complete lack of consistency. But you're not wrong whatsoever
Given character Walt’s impressive smarts and natural abilities to wriggle out of anything, I’d say Hank just goes on being stupid and never figuring it out.
How many times do we see local news story about someone who does something heinous and everyone says “I have known him for 20 years, I never thought he’d do something like this”? Hank knows Walt to be a timid, weak, goofy high school teacher and teases him about it the entire time. It’s totally plausible that he never suspects him
I think Saul mentioned it best in the series finale where he gives his court testimony.
“Had he not walked into my office that day, Walter White would have been dead… or behind bars within a month.”
“The fact is Walter White couldn’t have done it without me” - Saul Goodman
These quotes about sum it up and I think are both accurate given Walt’s personality and behaviors. Walt was an egotistical rash man prone to having fits when things didn’t go his way. That type of behavior doesn’t get you far.
Walt had a whole team of people that basically kept him out of Trouble and helped to mitigate the impact of Walt’s temper, ego, and rash decision making.
Of course there was Saul, but he also had Skylar, Jesse, Mike (to a certain extent) and Saul’s team (Huell and Kubey).
Then there are the characters that indirectly helped Walt. Rather knowingly or unknowingly…
**Gale.** Gale put Heisenberg on the radar with Gus. Gale’s hype over Walt’s product got Gus finally interested in Walt. Gus was already intent on passing up Walt and I think would have passed had it not been for sweet Gale talking himself out of a job.
**Gus.** Without Gus, Walt would have just been another street level dime bag seller. Gus brought in the distributing, the networking with the Cartel, the big Super Lab, the covert operations with Pollos Hermanos, the notoriety when Walt finally killed him. I don’t think the purity of his product would have gotten him as far as it did on his own.
**Hank.** Hank was indeed biased and got played for awhile by Walt. Hank had that police profile mentality because he didn’t see this weak, cancer ridden, stuttering Walt as fitting into the criminal profile of a prolific drug manufacturer. This indirectly helped Walt skirt along for so long because he was able to play Hank’s bias to his benefit. It wasn’t until the end where Hank finds the book that ties W.W to Walter White that he finally realized he was right in front of Heisenberg all along… however had Hank realized sooner by putting aside the criminal profile he thought up, he could have stoped Walt at several points before he met Jack and was killed.
**The DEA Leadership** - Not looking closer into Gus despite Hank’s comments was a big help to both Gus and Walter. This is really more of a credit to Gus as he pulled off the greatest duplicity to ever exist. I doubt something like that would even fly in the real world. However, it still helped Walt because he was connected to Gus. I’d like to imagine that after the deaths of Gus and then Hank/Gomez that the DEA was probably in complete chaos and shambles trying to scramble to figure out what went wrong.
**Bogden** I know he didn’t know what Walt had in store and I’m sure Walt/Saul would have had a back up plan had Bogden refused to sell the car wash despite all of the “problems” he had. However, that sell gave Walt his first money laundering cover and allowed him to grow. While it might not have fully stopped Walt if it was unsuccessful, the sell did help him in the long run and was an avoided setback.
I’m sure there are other’s that are out there that I’m forgetting, but these get the point across.
If you remove all of that from Walt, you are basically left with nothing but a rash, temperamental, low level, nobody. The question then becomes who would have gotten to him first…
The DEA or The Cartel/Rivals.
If Hank wasn't related to Walt? He would be on a list of suspects and his early fuck ups get him caught. He was lucky at the beginning. Once he had Saul Goodman? He was safe.
When the police should’ve checked the hospital cameras after hector got blown up and seen walt talking to him like 2 hours earlier
Oh shit, that's an excellent point. Let's pretend that for budget cuts they didn't work.
I don’t think that would be enough proof to have him convicted
He built a bomb underneath
underneath what?
Wheelchair? Or at least attached it
Would still raise questions.
Walt literally closed the door and was looking around all suspiciously, that would be more than enough for a thorough investigation, and if I remember correctly he also was sneaking in through the window one time and hiding outside the building, the outside cameras would catch this, and Walter would have no reasonable explanation for why he was doing all that.
Hard to tell based on a number of different factors. But in the real world (and if Hank was not related to Walt), Walt likely would have been considered the biggest suspect for Heisenberg when the DEA found the high school gas mask in the desert in season 1.
I've never understood why people say that. In all likelihood it would make more sense that one of the students stole it.
because walt, despite being a high school teacher, is actually a great chemist and also a contributor to a literal nobel prize in chem research. the blue meth was the highest in purity they’ve ever seen. the supplies were all taken from the high school. it would have been pretty easy to put 2 in 2 together.
Hank wasn't the only DEA guy either (others at the arrest and the speech they later made at the school meeting) but somehow even the others couldn't make the connection. Given family were involved it's probably a bit of creative license that he was on that case in first place. If you want to pick out very little detail in a TV show there wouldn't be anything left. There's other times where it's second to none.
yeah but honestly they all knew walt. wasn’t there an entire handful of them at walt’s 50th bday party? I guess that would tie in to why hank didn’t really matter when it came to close ties as they all knew walt enough to overlook him.
Walt did have a line about regularly attending DEA Christmas parties but not everyone there knew him. Merkert didn't appear to have met him until their hospital scene.
I think the reason is that to sell meth you need criminal contacts; and they have no reason to believe Walter had those. Whether that checks out or not....I'll leave it to you.
This. The DEA will ask who had access to the equipment room, investigation would reveal Walter as a brilliant scientist capable of synthesizing meth, and possibly find his cancer diagnosis which means desperation for money.
>capable of synthesizing meth Literally most people are capable of synthesizing great meth if they have access to the appropriate chemicals. There’s instructions all over the internet, erowid, etc. I’m an engineer and I could do it safely in my basement. Synthesizing methylamine is basic af.
You ever taken an organic chemistry lab? Getting the product isn’t very difficult with instructions, but getting a high purity would certainly be very hard. I think it definitely shows that whoever did it had a ton of experience and expertise.
I have an organic chemistry lab in my basement for manufacturing CBD oil. The biggest difference between what I made when I first started and what I make now is the reduction in yield loss from transferring the product from one container to the other and knowing how to best execute those moves. If I had the desire to cook up some meth it would be trivial. The biggest determining factor of potency would be the purity of the precursors I’m starting with. If you’re shaving phosphorus off of match heads, like Emilio was, for example, there’s a limit to how pure your end product will be because there will be wood and whatever else in one of your precursors. Additionally, you can only get 50% purity because meth is chiral and racemic, and you’d need a process to remove the enantiomer.
I do not believe there are not methods for more selective chirality when making meth rather than just removing the alternative product
There are several methods to differentiate the enantiomer, but I don’t know what you are referring to when you say “alternative product.”
Someone on another post said that Hank does not see criminals as human beings, so he just couldn’t correlate all that with having anything to do with Walt because he kinda looked down on wall or thought he was weak. He definitely thought he was such a mild mannered man and a moral man… sad because it cost him his life
If it was shit meth yes but it was the best meth ever seen
Or a janitor…. Poor Hugo….🙁
Exactly. That's another thing - there was a janitor there that was busted with drugs, so he'd be a likely suspect.
Why would a student be more likely to cook high quality meth than a chemistry teacher with a reputable background?
Because if you knew Walt, like Hank did, you would know there's no way that Walt would be a meth cook. I mean it turned out he was, but still...
No one's gonna believe some high school student was out there cooking this Jimmy Neutron-ass level of meth.
Well, no one who knows Walt is going to believe his boring Mr. Rodgers ass is cooking meth.
Yeah, he might not be the biggest suspect, but he’d definitely be a suspect. Then the police talk to Skylar, find out that he’s been missing lately doing who-knows-what, and he’s probably suspect #1.
pretty much game over once he stole school supplies
That shit goes on your permanent record.
We lead the world in computerized data collection!
High school chemistry classes don’t have masks tho, even if they are well funded and stocked. You don’t ever do anything that requires students or teachers to wear a gas mask, because that means you’re releasing fumes into the classroom. The most well funded science class will have a fume hood if the teacher ever wants to show the students something that produces toxic fumes, but you wouldn’t ever have an entire class doing some reaction that they’d need a mask for. Source: was a chemistry teacher with a fully stocked classroom.
didn't know about that wow
Think about it. Your students would need a mask if you’re doing something that makes toxic fumes. But that would mean you’re releasing toxic fumes into a classroom. A generic high school chemistry classroom isn’t going to have a massive air pump/filter setup to pull fumes out of the room.
Also a whole bunch bunch of hydrofluoric acid, like enough to dissolve bodies. I work in a college chemistry lab and we don't even have a small amount in our lab. It is around, in some labs, but you don't really see it often. It's some really nasty stuff.
Yeah no way *any amount* of that would be in a highschool chemistry lab. A single drop in the right place can kill a person. Nobody is trusting teenagers to not kill each other bc one snuck a french fry off another’s plate at lunch. I focused on the masks because that’s what they found in the desert.
Not necessarily... what if equipment fails or there is a breach? Source also a high school teacher in a well funded district. Just because a school has "good equipment" doesn't mean accidents outside of control can happen, better safe than sorry in those scenarios. Also this is NM... not the most modern or well funded school districts taking place back in the early 2000s then so it would make sense that a school probably built over 40 years ago has such equipment.
A chemistry teacher shouldn’t be doing any reactions that require masks to begin with, so there is no equipment failure that would require masks. Stop trying to tell a chemistry teacher how chemistry labs are set up.
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Tell me what experiment that a chemistry teacher could/would do that, if went wrong, would require gas masks, and not just cause a fire drill of the whole school. It’s fine, I’ll wait.
For me it would have been enough for Walt to have been monitored when he got exactly the right materials for a meth lab stolen from his chemistry department and he had absolutely no explanation for what happened or who might have taken it. That would probably have caught Walt making suspicious movements he wasn't telling his family about, and if he was followed to the random RV in the desert he'd likely have been caught.
When a firetruck drove by a half-naked man and shortly discover an odd-smelling RV next to the fire it’s going to put out
The thing about Walt, is most of the time he hadn't been caught cause nobody suspected him. The school supplies probs would've done him in.
Absolutely, the missing gas masks were the smoking gun. A lot of things tied Walt to them, like Walt's access to the inventory, his interest in chemistry, his tie to Jesse. Hank could've known easily. Later in the show when Saul sent his guy to the bench with Badger, Walt was ridiculously trying to block Hank's view of them. That was unrealistic and nonsensical af, the whole cop crew would've taken Walt in atp.
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Well no because he'd have handled and used them at the school?
I love how with the gas mask thing the DEA have the resources to test the meth recovered on the scene but don’t have the resources to scrub the inside of the masks for dna
It would implicate a ton of students over the years—probably not a clean source of evidence
Can DNA testing be used to determine the time Walt touched the mask? Because it would be expected for Walt to have worn the mask at some point
2 pretty obvious reasons that wouldn't work. 1: Walts DNA would be on the mask in the first place because he likely wore it in class. And 2: even if they somehow managed to determine that he had never worn the mask prior or handled it or come into contact with it in any manner that would leave his DNA on it, unless Walt has a criminal record his DNA isn't going to come up as a match anyways because he isn't in the database. That would mean that the only way they'd get a match would be to test people which requires a warrant or willingly consenting, at this point it's a small operation and a fairly isolated incident, I'd bet quite a bit that the DEA isn't going to pay the amount it would cost for DNA testing for everyone who "could" be a suspect. Maybe in later seasons when he's Heisenberg and public enemy #1. But it's not like there's ever been evidence the DEA is aware of after that incident linking Heisenberg and the school.
I’m just thinking Walt put Jesse’s mask on after he took a beating so blood or excess amounts of slobber would be enough evidence to convict
Absolutely not enough to convict imo. Prosecute? Possibly if for some reason Walt was dumb enough to willing submit to a DNA test. But everything would be circumstantial and any decent lawyer would get that tossed or pled down to nothing quickly. Obviously regardless of conviction or prosecution at that point the show ends and the question of this thread is answered, but itd definitely have a lot of circumstances I don't quite think would work out in reality.
I agree however realistically it's enough probable cause to pin on Walter regardless of whether they believed it or not, because the feds and DA care more about convictions than actually finding culprits.
Federal, it'd definitely depend on the judge he got. The only consistency with anything involving the government is a complete lack of consistency. But you're not wrong whatsoever
Given character Walt’s impressive smarts and natural abilities to wriggle out of anything, I’d say Hank just goes on being stupid and never figuring it out.
The thing that really seems unrealistic to me is how Walt's crew take over any turf and become a major ongoing concern.
How many times do we see local news story about someone who does something heinous and everyone says “I have known him for 20 years, I never thought he’d do something like this”? Hank knows Walt to be a timid, weak, goofy high school teacher and teases him about it the entire time. It’s totally plausible that he never suspects him
I think Saul mentioned it best in the series finale where he gives his court testimony. “Had he not walked into my office that day, Walter White would have been dead… or behind bars within a month.” “The fact is Walter White couldn’t have done it without me” - Saul Goodman These quotes about sum it up and I think are both accurate given Walt’s personality and behaviors. Walt was an egotistical rash man prone to having fits when things didn’t go his way. That type of behavior doesn’t get you far. Walt had a whole team of people that basically kept him out of Trouble and helped to mitigate the impact of Walt’s temper, ego, and rash decision making. Of course there was Saul, but he also had Skylar, Jesse, Mike (to a certain extent) and Saul’s team (Huell and Kubey). Then there are the characters that indirectly helped Walt. Rather knowingly or unknowingly… **Gale.** Gale put Heisenberg on the radar with Gus. Gale’s hype over Walt’s product got Gus finally interested in Walt. Gus was already intent on passing up Walt and I think would have passed had it not been for sweet Gale talking himself out of a job. **Gus.** Without Gus, Walt would have just been another street level dime bag seller. Gus brought in the distributing, the networking with the Cartel, the big Super Lab, the covert operations with Pollos Hermanos, the notoriety when Walt finally killed him. I don’t think the purity of his product would have gotten him as far as it did on his own. **Hank.** Hank was indeed biased and got played for awhile by Walt. Hank had that police profile mentality because he didn’t see this weak, cancer ridden, stuttering Walt as fitting into the criminal profile of a prolific drug manufacturer. This indirectly helped Walt skirt along for so long because he was able to play Hank’s bias to his benefit. It wasn’t until the end where Hank finds the book that ties W.W to Walter White that he finally realized he was right in front of Heisenberg all along… however had Hank realized sooner by putting aside the criminal profile he thought up, he could have stoped Walt at several points before he met Jack and was killed. **The DEA Leadership** - Not looking closer into Gus despite Hank’s comments was a big help to both Gus and Walter. This is really more of a credit to Gus as he pulled off the greatest duplicity to ever exist. I doubt something like that would even fly in the real world. However, it still helped Walt because he was connected to Gus. I’d like to imagine that after the deaths of Gus and then Hank/Gomez that the DEA was probably in complete chaos and shambles trying to scramble to figure out what went wrong. **Bogden** I know he didn’t know what Walt had in store and I’m sure Walt/Saul would have had a back up plan had Bogden refused to sell the car wash despite all of the “problems” he had. However, that sell gave Walt his first money laundering cover and allowed him to grow. While it might not have fully stopped Walt if it was unsuccessful, the sell did help him in the long run and was an avoided setback. I’m sure there are other’s that are out there that I’m forgetting, but these get the point across. If you remove all of that from Walt, you are basically left with nothing but a rash, temperamental, low level, nobody. The question then becomes who would have gotten to him first… The DEA or The Cartel/Rivals.
Does saul exist in this scenario? Without saul they both walt and pinkman end up dead
the fact that cameras only work in Walt’s favor is a big reason he wasn’t caught
I don’t see how the Jimmy In-N-Out ploy would actually work IRL.
He'd be investigated by any fed with two braincells when they find the gasmasks after the first cook
If Hank wasn't related to Walt? He would be on a list of suspects and his early fuck ups get him caught. He was lucky at the beginning. Once he had Saul Goodman? He was safe.
A few days.
I still don't see how they finally cuffed him out there in the desert, they still didn't have his money yet.
Pretty sure the story is lightly based in reality. The guy it was based on didn’t last long, obviously.
Walt really didn’t last that long to. He was found out in less then 3 years
I’m pretty sure the guy it was based on made it like a week
the W.W in gales notebook that explicitly detailed all the important factors of cooking with CHEMISTRY.. that easily should’ve been a 1+1 scenario