The confrontation did not begin on the quad. It began in 2009, when the University of California Regents approved a 32 percent tuition increase. The following years brought escalating protests across the UC system: arrests at Berkeley, baton strikes on students and professors, a general sense among California's public university communities that the social contract underlying affordable higher education was being dismantled. Occupy Wall Street launched in September 2011, and by November its energy had merged with longstanding campus grievances. On November 15, several hundred UC Davis students rallied on the quad. By November 17, roughly 25 tents stood between Memorial Union and Shields Library. Chancellor Linda Katehi informed the encampment that the tents must be removed by 3 PM on November 18, citing safety concerns. Some students complied. Many did not.

Police arrived in riot gear at 3:15 PM and began dismantling tents and arresting those who blocked removal. A group of students then sat down on the walkway, linking arms in a circle. They refused to move. Campus officers asked them to leave multiple times. Sometime around 4 PM, Lieutenant Pike and Officer Alex Lee deployed pepper spray directly onto the seated demonstrators while bystanders recorded with cell phones and the crowd chanted "Shame on you." Eleven protesters received medical treatment. Two were hospitalized. Ten arrests were made on misdemeanor charges of unlawful assembly and failure to disperse. The Reynoso task force report, released the following April, concluded that Pike's use of force was "objectively unreasonable" and found no factual basis for his claim that officers had been trapped by the seated students.

The next day, Chancellor Katehi held a press conference and then walked out of an administration building into something she did not expect. Hundreds of students lined the sidewalk in complete silence, creating a corridor three blocks long to her waiting car. No chanting, no signs. Just bodies and stillness. The image of that walk became its own kind of viral moment, a wordless indictment more powerful than any speech. Katehi appeared on CNN that evening expressing partial remorse, then called for a task force to review the incident. The UC Davis Faculty Association demanded her resignation. The Academic Senate later censured her. On November 21, an estimated 5,000 people gathered on campus, and Katehi apologized publicly, insisting she had explicitly ordered no arrests and no use of force. "I want to unequivocally apologize to the entire community for the appalling use of pepper spray," she told a crowd of about 1,000 students at a town hall meeting.

Among the most damning assessments came from an unexpected source. Kamran Loghman, who helped develop pepper spray with the FBI in the 1980s and had assisted in writing use-of-force guidelines for police departments, told reporters that the Davis incident "violated his original intent." He said he had never seen "such an inappropriate and improper use of chemical agents." Pepper spray, he explained, was designed for situations where someone physically threatens an officer. The seated, linked-arm posture of the Davis students was the opposite of that scenario. Pike was placed on administrative leave and was fired by the university on July 31, 2012, despite a review panel recommendation for disciplinary action short of termination. He then filed a workers' compensation claim for psychiatric injury, citing the 17,000 hostile emails, 10,000 text messages, and hundreds of threatening letters he received after the hacktivist group Anonymous published his personal information. An administrative law judge awarded him $38,056.

The university settled a class-action lawsuit in September 2012, paying $30,000 to each of the 21 students who had been sprayed, along with $50,000 in legal fees and a $100,000 reserve for future claims. But the story did not end with settlements. The image of Pike had already become an internet meme, Photoshopped into famous paintings, historical photographs, and absurd contexts. UC Davis hired the consulting firm Nevins and Associates on a six-month, $15,000-per-month contract to pursue the "eradication of references to the pepper-spray incident in search results on Google." The university's communications budget ballooned from roughly $3 million in 2009 to $5.5 million by 2015. The effort to scrub the internet made headlines of its own. Chancellor Katehi resigned in August 2016, retaining her professorship, the title of chancellor emerita, and a year of paid sabbatical at $424,360. The image, of course, remains.