Missed Opportunity? An ankle monitor was tracking a violent crime suspect but no one noticed
“Missed opportunity, not following through,” she said through tears. “I don’t know which word to use. Shock, Heartbreak. Disappointment. It hurts.”
Trail led to arrest after killing
Johnell Hampton and his Uber driver Andrew Stiller were riddled with bullets during an ambush-style shooting on Lundi Gras. Stiller's devastating injuries caused him to crash onto the Interstate-10 and into a passing car, injuring the three people inside. But the gunman wasn’t done. Police say he ran up to the wrecked cars and continued firing, gravely wounding a woman in the head.
“It’s senseless. Barbaric,” said NOPD Homicide Commander Capt. Kevin Burns. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my twenty plus years on the job.”
Detectives say technology was instrumental in identifying 33-year-old Tyree Quinn as one of four suspects. In a police report, a detective states Quinn's electronic ankle bracelet places him at the murder scene.
“We do have some information that he was wearing an ankle monitor,” Burns said at a press conference to announce Quinn’s arrest. “And it absolutely aided in this investigation with his apprehension.”
The electronic trail left by Quinn's ankle bracelet can be seen using the GPS technology as dots on a computer screen, including at the crime scene at the precise time shots rang out at 5:31 p.m. But the full GPS trail shows an even more chilling sequence of events.
Path of violent suspect was clear
WWL-TV obtained exclusive access to the Quinn’s ankle monitor track, providing an extremely rare look at a murder suspect's alleged actions before, during and after the killings.
After moving throughout New Orleans East for several hours before the killings, the ankle bracelet track is seen coming to a stop in front of an apartment complex where Hampton was visiting. The dot on the screen stays for 24 minutes, then begins moving just before the shooting.
“It’s eerie. You know, you're not watching a TV show. You’re watching what's real. And you know right away what’s happening,” said Matt Dennis, owner and operator of the electronic monitoring company. “And you captured that piece of people’s lives forever as dots on a screen.”
This wasn't the normal crime ankle monitoring
Dennis, who calls his company ASAP, Assured Supervision Accountability Program, helped place the ankle bracelet on Quinn.
But Quinn’s case was not like most cases, in which electronic monitoring is ordered by a judge, with conditions such as curfew or home confinement.
Quinn’s monitor was requested by the bail bond company that posted his $225,000 bond after he was booked in November with armed robbery, auto theft and being a felon with a gun. That meant Quinn was free to come and go, as long as he made his court appearances.
“In the case of Tyree Quinn the honor system didn’t work too well” said Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a non-profit criminal justice watchdog group.
In fact, 17 days earlier, a police report states that Quinn was spotted in a stolen car with his 36-year-old brother Ymine Quinn. The officers, including state police troopers, say they approached the brothers after they spotted Ymine wearing a ski mask and holding a gun.
The brothers sped away, the officers wrote, leading them on a high-speed chase across town with a State Police helicopter keeping track of them from the air.
The police car chase ended across town at Tulane Avenue and Salcedo Street, according to the report. Police wrote that Ymine jumped out, pointed a gun at officers, but was captured a short distance away.
Tyree escaped. The track from his ankle bracelet shows him leaving the scene, first on foot, then at speeds showing he got into a car.
The clues were there, but apparently no one looked
The track of the ankle bracelet precisely matches the narrative in the police report, including the chase hitting speeds close to 100 miles an hour on I-10. Officers say they recovered a gun and a stash of drugs, including cocaine, fentanyl, ecstasy and marijuana from Ymine.
Ymine Quinn was booked on the gun and drugs charges, plus being in possession of a stolen car. But the efforts to find and arrest Tyree seem to end right there.
“Had they arrested him for that, it's possible that he may not have been out on the street to commit the murder on February the 20th,” Goyeneche said.
It is not clear if police were even aware that Quinn could be tracked through his ankle bracelet. But using the tracking system, WWL-TV was able to re-construct his electronic trail that night, pinpointing the device's location before, during and after the chase.
“They've got Tyree second-by-second in this police chase 17 days before the killing,” Dennis said. “You discovered this. And I think NOPD is going to jump all over it. But you clearly put these together. And it’s true. The data supports everything that police report says.”
Melissa Stiller, the widow of the Uber driver, was heartbroken.
“Missed opportunity, not following through,” she said through tears. “I don’t know which word to use. Shock, Heartbreak. Disappointment. It hurts.”
Stiller wonders if her husband would still be alive if police had known Quinn was wearing an ankle bracelet.
“I understand there's a lot going on in New Orleans and these detectives have a lot of cases,” she said. “Hire more. It’s all the information, as you're showing me right here, yet he's walking around in the streets.”
About 10 years ago, New Orleans criminal defendants on ankle monitors were regularly tracked in a joint effort between the Sheriff's Office and NOPD. That system, known as proximity reporting, matched crime locations to suspects with ankle bracelets. But the program collapsed due to personnel shortages and in-fighting.
Goyeneche said it’s time to bring the technology back.
“This technology, as important as it was back in 2014 and '15, is even more critically important because of the manpower crisis right now,” he said.
For its part, ASAP is doing just that. The company has given anyone in law enforcement access to everyone they are tracking. So far, 37 NOPD officers have been given passwords and training, according to ASAP.
“Within a week of doing the full city training, four people, they were able to solve four crimes based on proximity reporting,” said Jill Dennis, ASAP co-owner.
That training came after the Tyree Quinn case. But when WWL-TV looked backwards at Quinn's bracelet, and with the click of computer mouse, one location pops up over and over again: an apartment complex in the East.
It’s not only the apartment where police arrested Quinn 10 days after the murders, but it’s the same location that his ankle monitor shows directly after the drug chase with his brother, and 17 days later after the murders themselves.
The tracking technology made Quinn easy for officers to find and take into custody. Several grieving families wish that somebody had been looking for him earlier.
Quinn remains in jail after his new bail was set at $2.8 million. WWLTV reached out to the NOPD for comment, but did not get a response.