On September 28th I received a call from a Lee County, Florida Sheriff's Office regarding a missing 13-year-old girl who was believed to be with a man from Tennessee. The agency had gotten my name as a Tennessee contact from an intel group and reached out. Since they believed the girl was two hours away in the Chattanooga area, I could have easily told them to call the CPD or Hamilton County Sheriff's Office dispatcher numbers, but it's our duty to help people. I used CrimeTracer to search for their suspect and learned he had a series of reports in the Chattanooga area in the last couple of years wherein he was named as a complainant, witness, or victim, which led to good possible phone numbers, a residence address, and employer information. I compiled a quick intel sheet on the suspect and sent it to the Lee County (FL) Sheriff's Office and two of my friends at Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI). Within a few hours, TBI and Chattanooga PD had recovered the missing girl and had the suspect in custody. I ran the suspect through other public records databases and came up with some of the same information, but having recent official police reports where the suspect provided his biographical data made the intel package much better and gave a more thorough pattern of life picture that allowed a vulnerable person to be returned safely to her family and held a man more than twice her age accountable for taking her across state lines for nefarious purposes. THIS case cemented my love of CrimeTracer - and it wasn't even my case!
When the Orange County Sheriff's Department hit a dead end investigating cell tower battery thefts that threatened critical telecommunications infrastructure, they had only a suspect's license plate, expired for four years, with no current address on file. CrimeTracer surfaced a single out-of-county contact, a repossession record, that no traditional database could produce. That lead gave investigators the suspects' address, connected the vehicle to multiple theft locations across Orange and Riverside Counties, and led them to a suspected fencing operation. In this case, one contact from another county turned an expired four-year-old license plate into an actionable investigative lead. Nothing like a win from a repo report to solve a case.
I attended a CrimeTracer training class on Thursday, August 20, 2026, at a local police department. Later that day, I returned to my desk and decided to conduct a search of the associates of a male suspect involved in a motor vehicle pursuit the previous weekend. During the investigation, the suspect had briefly mentioned allowing a friend to borrow the vehicle involved in the pursuit. Using CrimeTracer’s “Advanced Search”, typing in the original suspect's name, followed by the “+ Add to Associated" feature, removing all Associations other than "PERSON", and then clicking "Find Associations", I was able to identify another male who was similar in age to the original suspect. After reviewing a local agency’s report through CrimeTracer, I was able to confirm that the two males were friends. I then reviewed the RMV photograph of the newly identified individual and observed that he had white gauges in both earlobes. I compared this identifying characteristic with video footage I had obtained from the location where the pursuit began. Upon reviewing each camera angle, I observed that the individual captured in the footage also appeared to have white gauges in both earlobes. The CrimeTracer training I had attended earlier that day provided me with the knowledge to utilize the “Advanced Search” and “Associates” features, which ultimately helped me identify a potential suspect and corroborate an important physical characteristic seen in the video footage. This was a great example of how CrimeTracer can quickly connect investigative information and provide valuable leads that may otherwise be difficult to locate.
At my former agency, I was the lead on a homicide. I had suspect surveillance and CDR's associated to a burner phone. I was able to provide the surveillance to casino security in Primm, Nevada. They found the suspect at a gas station, which resulted in a license plate for a rental vehicle. This provided me with ALPR evidence of the vehicle near the crime scene before and after the homicide, as well as the name for the suspect through an LAPD citation the month prior.
