NEW ORLEANS — In one of New Orleans most high-profile murders of 2023, a 21-year-old man was stalked, ambushed, then fatally shot in a shower of gunfire shortly after he drove off as the passenger in an Uber. The ride-share driver also was killed. A third victim in a passing car on the interstate was shot in the head and died five months later.
“It's senseless. Barbaric. I've never seen anything like that in my twenty-plus years on the job,” NOPD Homicide Commander Capt. Kevin Burns said, describing the crime.
Out of four gunmen, Tyree Quinn is the lone suspect booked so far in the killings. He was identified with the help of technology that is fast becoming a key tool for law enforcement: electronic GPS monitoring.
“It absolutely aided in this investigation with his apprehension,” Burns said.
But police could have caught Quinn before the triple murder.
In the WWL-TV story “Tracking a Murder," the station used data from that ankle bracelet to map Quinn's path during a drug bust and high-speed chase. That was 17 days before the killings.
Police had access to the same data, but at the time, nobody followed the trail.
Since that missed opportunity, the landscape is changing. The New Orleans Police Department is now using ankle monitor data to retrace the steps of suspects and solve crimes.
“They're getting more and more used to it,” said Matt Dennis, founder and operator of the city’s predominant monitoring company, Assured Supervision Accountability Program. “We have created a process with NOPD where they are doing proximity reporting on a lot of our violent crime.”
At any given time, the husband-and-wife private company monitors about 300 defendants awaiting trial. Most ankle bracelets are court-ordered, while others are required as a safeguard by bail bond companies. The court orders are often accompanied by curfews or home confinement.
And most of the time, the system works. But not always.
Keita Strong, 19, was ordered into electronic monitoring by a magistrate commissioner with a 4 p.m. curfew while awaiting trial on domestic violence charges. ASAP fitted him for a bracelet. The first few months went fine.
But over the summer, Strong began violating his curfew. First by a little. Then by a lot. During that time, he stopped responding to ASAP's text messages as required by the company.
Every time a defendant on an ankle monitor violates conditions of release, ASAP issues violation reports and sends them to the judges presiding over that defendant’s case.
Strong racked up dozens of such reports.
For example, on July 17, an ASAP violation report shows that Strong was flagged for being out until 11 p.m., seven hours beyond his curfew. On Aug. 5, Strong’s GPS signal shows he was out all night, bouncing from the French Quarter to various bars, businesses and a motel.
“That's your offender sticking his toes in the water,” Matt Dennis said. “Well, nothing happened, so he's going to put his whole foot in the water. Next thing you know, he's out standing in the water. Then he’s swimming in the water.”
Then, in an Aug. 23 report, Strong's GPS signal shows him violating curfew again. On that night, the computer tracks Strong to the scene of a double shooting inside a car in New Orleans East at about 8 p.m., then to the hospital.
The car was later found containing another victim, shot dead. Strong’s bracelet captures the entire chilling sequence through the minute-by-minute path he generated on the ASAP computer program.
“I believe that if Keita Strong had been corrected early, he'd have never ever been shot. He'd have been at home,” Matt Dennis said.
Just as in all ASAP cases, the company emailed all violation reports to the section of court handling Strong’s case, that of New Orleans Criminal Court Judge Benedict Willard.
But no action was taken by the judge.
“It's not the technology's fault. It's the judge's fault,” Goyeneche said. “Faced life-threatening injuries. And there was another dead person in the car. And this was highly preventable if the judge had taken action,” Goyenche said.
Willard explained that Strong’s monitoring and curfew restrictions were not ordered not by him, but in magistrate court. He said that Strong's violations were “never brought to my attention in open court by prosecutors, police or anybody.”
But what about the emails his court received about violations?
Willard said he only deals with documents officially entered into the court record, not reports emailed by third-party operators like ASAP.
District Attorney Jason Williams disagrees with that approach.
“A violation of a court order is a violation of a court order,” Williams said. “It should not matter what judge put the order in place. Someone is in direct violation of the terms of their release.”
The court's other 11 section judges have started using information from ASAP ankle monitors.
“We have judges who over there if you stop and get a candy bar, you're going to jail for two weeks,” Matt Dennis said. “And we have judges over there who act like they don't see this happening.”
Judge Willard said another issue he has is that the main provider of GPS tracking is a private operator, unlike a decade ago when electronic monitoring was operated by the Sheriff's Office and NOPD. And while ASAP's model provides 24/7 monitoring and violation reports, there are no official state-mandated standards for the program.
Willard offered a similar explanation in the case of Craig Howard. Howard was on a magistrate-ordered ankle bracelet in July when he fled the courthouse after failing a drug test ordered by Willard.
While on the run, Howard was tracked by ASAP to a Home Depot, where he used a bolt cutter to remove his bracelet. ASAP alerted Willard, but the judge declined to issue an arrest warrant during the chase. Howard escaped.
After Howard returned to court a month later and failed a second drug test, Willard ordered a bench warrant to hold him without bail.
Despite the reluctance to use electronic monitoring in some sections of New Orleans Criminal Court, federal law enforcement is enthusiastically embracing the technology.
A Sept. 11 letter from the local FBI chief to ASAP thanks the company for using its technology to help solve six cases – including four murders – from New Orleans to Jefferson Parish to Lafayette.
“Your station has done a number of stories about all of this,” said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the non-profit watchdog group the Metropolitan Crime Commission. “And what we're seeing is law enforcement is getting hits. And they're starting to solve some of these cases.”
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