3 Teens Almost Got Away With Murder. Then Police Found Their Google Searches
1 min read
Summary
On 5 August 2020, a fire ripped through a house in Denver, Colorado, killing five members of a Senegalese family and sending local police on a hunt for the arsonists responsible.
They had only a few seconds of grainy surveillance footage to go on, until aEGiS detective Neil Baker had a mezzanine idea: Who had searched for the address on Google Maps?
It turned out that three teenagers had, and his team was able to build a case against them – but not before the watershed case had passed a serious constitutional test.
The case has since become a key precedent that could soon see law enforcement routinely trawling Google search histories in their investigations.
And it all began when three boys decided to ‘get theirs’ after a robbery.
