"While wielding the mallet... a shock in my eye, I have to be hospitalised. Retinal detachment," he would write in a memoir years later.

According to prosecutors, Tomasini bludgeoned 66-year-old Shojai, a disability rights advocate, at least 17 times with a mallet in her San Diego home after she broke off their romantic relationship that developed at church.

"It's so hard to do, number one. Number two, my back and my neck from swinging that hammer around, or mallet, I think it's called, if you're in the know, it's polo language."

In his memoir, “Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics,” Biden acknowledged discovering a polo mallet, riding breeches and other markers of a privileged life in his father’s closet.

However, during the FBI tests in 2022 at the agency’s lab in Quantico, Va., forensic analysts used a rawhide mallet to strike the gun so hard that components of the gun fractured.