3 Teens Almost Got Away With Murder. Then Police Found Their Google Searches www.wired.com/story/find-m…
— David Foose (@davefoose.bsky.social) May 21, 2025 at 9:26 AM
Wiredz — “An arson attack in Colorado had detectives stumped. The way they solved the case could put everyone at risk”:
Amadou Sow woke to the shrieking of smoke detectors. It was a little after 2:30 am on August 5, 2020, and his house in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, was ablaze. The 46-year-old rushed to his bedroom door, but a column of smoke and heat forced him back. Panicked, Sow ran to the rear window, broke the screen with his hand, and jumped. The two-story drop fractured his left foot.
Sow’s wife Hawa Ka woke their daughter Adama, who shared their room. She dragged the terrified 10-year-old to the window and pushed her out. Sow tried to catch her but missed. Miraculously, the girl landed on her hands and feet, uninjured. Then it was Ka’s turn. When she leaped, she fell on her back, shattering her spine in two places. Sow barely heard her howls of pain. He was thinking about their 22-year-old son, Oumar.
He couldn’t see any movement inside Oumar’s room. He hurled a rock at the window, but the glass held steady. Despair filled him. Then he noticed Oumar’s car wasn’t in the driveway. He must be working his night shift at 7-Eleven. Thank God! Sow’s family was safe. But what about the others in the house? All told, nine people called 5312 Truckee Street home.
Sow had bought the four-bedroom property in the northeastern suburb of Green Valley Ranch in 2018. The neighborhood was newly built and sparsely populated, cut off from the bulk of the city by miles of prairie grass, giving it an isolated, ghost-town feel. But for Sow, a Senegalese immigrant who usually worked nights at Walmart, the home was a refuge. Not long after his family moved in, his old friend Djibril Diol’s family joined them. Diol—Djiby to his friends—was 29 and a towering 6’8″, a civil engineer who hoped to one day take his skills back to Senegal…
At the same time firefighters were entering the house on Truckee Street, Neil Baker, a homicide detective for the Denver Police Department (DPD), was awoken by a call from his sergeant. Baker—in his fifties with reading glasses, thinning hair, and a rosy complexion—threw on a suit, muttered a hurried goodbye to his wife, and jumped in his car.
After nearly 30 years as a Denver-area cop, Baker knew his way around town. He also knew that Green Valley Ranch was a confusing rabbit’s warren of nearly identical roads. So before he set off, he did something innocuous, something anyone might have done: He Googled the address. And like anyone who Googles something, he was thinking about the search result he wanted—not the packets of data flitting between his device and Google’s servers, not the automated logs of what he was searching for and where he was searching from. But this unseen infrastructure would be key to figuring out what happened at Truckee Street—and it may soon extend the reach of law enforcement into the private lives of millions.
Three weeks before the fire, 16-year-old Kevin Bui went into central Denver to buy a gun. Bui had led a charmed life. His family emigrated from Vietnam before he was born, and though they struggled financially at first—Bui describes his childhood homes as “the projects”—by the time he started high school, his dad’s accounting business had taken off. The family moved to a palatial house in Lakewood, on Denver’s western outskirts, complete with views of the mountains. Bui took to wearing Gucci belts and Air Jordans.
“I disliked school, but I was always really good at it,” Bui tells me. He was athletic too—a swimmer, and an inside linebacker on his school football team, the Green Mountain Rams. He was close with his older sister, Tanya, despite their seven-year age difference. Tanya filled Kevin’s girlfriend’s lashes and bitched to him about her boyfriends. The siblings discussed adopting a dog together.
But there was a darker side to their life: Kevin and Tanya dealt fentanyl and marijuana, often finding customers on Snapchat. Kevin planned to start “carding,” stealing people’s credit card information on the dark web. And he took to amassing weapons.
The guys Bui had arranged to meet in central Denver on that day in July had promised to sell him a gun. Instead, they robbed him of his cash, iPhone, and shoes.
Afterward, Bui bubbled with humiliation. A few weeks earlier, football practice had shut down because of the pandemic. Classes had already been virtual for months. He felt he was “just doing bullshit”: waking up, logging on to Zoom, and returning to bed. The robbery tipped him over the edge. That night, at home in Lakewood, Bui resolved to get even. He pulled up the Find My device feature on his iPad and watched as it pinged his phone. The map zoomed east, past downtown, finally halting at Green Valley Ranch. A pin dropped at 5312 Truckee Street…
Bill Hicks
Sounds really interesting, but it is paywalled. Can anyone provide a short summary of how there might be broader implications?
Harrison Wesley
@Bill Hicks: I clicked on the first line of the extract and got in to the article.
rikyrah
@Bill Hicks:
I dunno. Can’t read it, but I thought that law enforcement could already go through your online searches and presence if it was part of an investigation. I already thought that privacy was gone.
Am I wrong?
Old School
@Bill Hicks: Your phone tracking where you are. The police could get a list of whose phone pinged.
There’s also a bit about the common use of doorbell cameras.
Percysowner
@Harrison Wesley:
Wired used to allow a few free articles a month, maybe that has changed. I got in using archive is. I have a handy dandy addon for Firefox that lets me open links in it. Maybe someone else knows how to do it manually for browsers that don’t have the addon? This is the link I got from archive is.
Joshua Todd James
Basically, the police asked Google for a list of people who googled a specific address and that’s how they found the killers, but the question is, is such a thing constitutional?
And honestly, it’s hard to say one way or the other, in this case.
Sure Lurkalot
Here’s an Archive link for the whole story:
http://archive.today/0QfQK
Jerry
Jesus. What a horrible tragedy for the family. The dumb ass kids murdered a family just because of one of them suffered from a bruised ego stemming from being tied up in shit that he had no business being involved with in the first place and then was led to the wrong house by a faulty app.
Harrison Wesley
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m reminded of the saying that hard cases make bad law. That young man sounds like he’s found his niche in life being in prison.
New Deal democrat
@Joshua Todd James:
Yes. Police did it the Fourth Anendment way: they got a warrant based on probable cause:
chemiclord
@rikyrah: Yeah, I’m not sure what “ramifications” are here that hasn’t already done.
Your search history has always been fair game during an investigation. Just like any incriminating evidence you might have on personal devices. The big question has always been if third parties (like the device maker) are obligated to access data if its been locked or if they are required to provide a “back door” (and potential security risk for all devices) for investigators.
The information itself is not at all protected. If police can get it, they can use it.
BrotherCrab
Bui sounds like a developing psychopath. I wonder what he would be doing if he had somehow escaped the consequences for his crimes. Judging from his ongoing criminality in jail, nothing good.
trollhattan
@BrotherCrab:
Bored rich brat with broken empathy issues. Seems like prison is the right place for him.
Gretchen
@Joshua Todd James: Only 5 people googled the address of the crime- a relative, a delivery service, and the three murderers. This isn’t like googling a general term like abortion.
chemiclord
On top of that, the nightmare scenario that the defense attorneys try to paint would hypothetically apply if the action was in fact a crime. It would be hypothetically be quite easy to respond to say a Texas DA asking for search history about Colorado abortion clinics with a “Abortion isn’t illegal in Colorado. Go pound sand.”
If Google didn’t do that, that would be more a problem with Google than the judgment in this particular case.
eclare
@Harrison Wesley:
Same here. Interesting read.
eclare
@Harrison Wesley:
Seriously. Makes you wonder what his home life was like.
Seanly
@chemiclord:
I think the difference is that if you are a person of interest then your search history via the IP addresses for your devices are fair game with a tailored search warrant. This is a bit of the opposite – they went digitally through the haystack to find who had searched for the address and compared that with who pinged off the nearby towers at the time of the incident. I’m very leery of government overreach & abuse of our 4th amendment rights, but it does seem like the steps to get information were reasoned (but IANAL). I picture like a Venn diagram – 1st circle who was in the area & 2nd circle is who searched for this address. The overlap might be your culprit.
So if they had been able to get a license plate number off the car then they could’ve said Bui is the car owner & we need a specific warrant for his Google searches.
BrotherCrab
@seanly I think the actual owner of the car was Bui’s sister.
Librettist
This is only problematic if ones definition of good police work is beating confessions out of the underclass.
Which is par for the course for a whole host of “Libertarian” brahs.
chemiclord
@Gretchen: Especially when you consider that police were specifically asking in the event of a crime.
Again, to poke a hole in the defense attorney’s argument, let’s just say an AD from Wyoming asks for anyone who googled a particular abortion clinic in Colorado. Google’s answer can (and should) be justifiably, “Abortion is legal in Colorado. You have no crime to investigate here. Fuck off.”
dc
If the murderers had used another search engine, DuckDuckGo or a less known alternative, then they would be free now.
Chetan Murthy
@dc: Or if they’d practiced decent opsec: used burner devices from locations and networks unrelated to their lives, for all their internet searches, and of course for the actual crime. But obvs. criminals are stupid.
I do wonder what was the root cause of the wrong house showing up in Find My Device, though.
Jeffg166
@Bill Hicks:
Google says:
Details of the Incident:
Key Events Leading to the Fire:
wonkie
What strikes me about this story is how soulless the two kids are. Living a life that presented them with every option imaginable: more education, opportunities to develop their talents and abilities, opportunities to enjoy life to learn and explore and more and what do they decide to do? Harm other people. That’s what they chose to do.
Chetan Murthy
First, I have no sympathy for him. I think the fact that he confessed (and if we are to believe the story, was guilt-ridden for months) seems to indicate that he’s a -developing- psychopath. But boy howdy, prison is gonna perfect that. Again, I have no sympathy for him: I’m just making detached observations.
This. These kids had so much, and their reaction was a life of crime. Just mind-boggling.
trollhattan
File under Criming as committed by douchenozzles, along with the above. And let it be added “crypto investor from Kentucky” cannot ever be a real job.
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan: That was some -wild- shit. Just amazing. But hey, “censorship-resistant!!”
Honoré De Ballsack
@Chetan Murthy:
As mentioned in the article, “Find My Device” isn’t very accurate—its results seem to have a “circle of error” of a few hundred meters. Whether that is by design or not, I don’t know.
Chetan Murthy
@Honoré De Ballsack: right, I saw that, and noted that it said “few feet to hundreds of miles”. I just wondered if the cops ever found out where the actual iphone went, is all. Not that it matters. At. All. Just curiousity on my part. Murdering somebody for stealing your iphone would also be murder.
oldster
I generally think that the American prison system is an inhumane hellhole of unjustifiable suffering.
Then there’s this kid. I don’t hear him suffering enough.
Baud
@Chetan Murthy:
Thanks for the advice.
oldster
@Baud:
Hey, you’ve never seen Chetan get put away for murder, have you? So, he seems to know what he’s talking about.
Chetan Murthy
@oldster: @Baud: Hey now, I’m just a big fan of The Wire!
ETA: But this is also why I pooh-pooh the idea of using Signal for comms security: the idea that somehow online comms aren’t already penetrated by the NSA (and “National Security Letters”) is just foolishness. If we get to the point that we need to be communicating stuff that would get us in trouble with The Man, that’ll all need to be offline.
scav
@Honoré De Ballsack: & @Chetan Murthy: I’d imagine it’s pretty inevitable until there’s a fairly tight and evenly distributed set of towers from which to triangulate the location. Regions of the nation have them, others don’t, thus, variation in quality. Regions of this country will have rooftop accurate coordinates for houses, others (especially rural areas) might still be relying on interpolated along a road segment coordinates, which can be really off, again, especially in rural areas. Areas of new construction will likely be off for a while.
Chetan Murthy
@scav: I don’t actually know how Find My Device works, but at least a cursory Google search seems to indicate that it uses GPS. Again, not that it matters at all.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102647#:~:text=Location%20Services%20uses%20GPS%20and,approximate%20location%20of%20your%20device.
trollhattan
On one hand, this is just dumb on the other, if it meant even a small chance of catching Huck….
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan: O tempora, O mores! That we are descended to such base times, that the news pap feels the need to tell us what a Molotov cocktail is. Sigh.
scav
@Chetan Murthy: Yeah, I’m more familiar with the GIS street centerline end of things (and a few years out of date with current datasets). If I remember the satellite end of things (and this info goes back to early days, back to when there was still masks or whatever put on the civilian signals) the coordinate quality was being improved by terrestrial stations of some type. I’ve also memories of tall buildings also degrading coordinate quallity, one problem at least that wasn’t rural.
I didn’t even get into the address-matching end of things, because I’m not entirely sure that enters into this exact case.
WTFGhost
@chemiclord: Well, one of the things that should happen, to be constitutionally pure, is, anyone who was not immediately connected to the case should be flushed, all records removed, as soon as the case closes, or, they have an alibi, or, within a reasonable time frame. “You are looking for the murderer – nothing, and no one, else.”
Otherwise, the warrant lets them see me (who visited the house to drop off some soup for a sick friend, and then went to a marijuana dispensary), and they decide to surveil me as a possible drug courier, because, hey, maybe someone in the house was dealing, see? And we drug users are all sus anyway, right? And, technically, I am violating federal law, so if I was a migrant, I’d be targeted for deportation.
You’re right – the key thing was, “once a properly worded warrant was given to Google, damn straight they’d hand it over. They *love* to help law enforcement so, when law enforcement is investigating *them*, they’re apt to see them as transparent.”
But there are very dicey ideas running through law enforcement. For example, they’ve gotten information from scraping social media, that they’re not allowed to use, because they scooped it up with an administrative warrant that doesn’t allow use in prosecution.
So they bluewash it – they find a way to connect enough dots that they pretend they got the data legitimately. Then the can cut a warrant based upon the very data they’re forbidden to use.
In the Biden administration, if that happened, they really were looking for drug lords and terrorists and other real criminals, but in the Trump admin, well, they’re certainly looking for en masse deportees, enemies of the adminstration, possible enemies of the administration, people who reasonably hate the administration, as well as other real criminals, drug lords, and terrorists.
(I might be making the Biden DoJ out to be better than they were – the main point is, however, Biden wasn’t looking for enemies; he ordered the DoJ to find criminals. That’s not Trump’s way. Trump likes to hurt people!)
RepubAnon
For all the Second Amendment fanatics claiming that firearm registration would make it easier for the government to locate firearm owner, this article shows that the government could get such a list from their Google metadata records with far less effort.
Another Scott
@Chetan Murthy: +1
My recollection (no time to check, corrections welcome) is that during the olden days of reporting on Total Information Awareness and the various laws about it, there was some provision that the NSA could hoover-up everything they found (that crossed the US border) that was encrypted and hold it for 5 years (in case they needed to break the encryption later).
The sensible thing these days is – don’t do criming. If you do decide to do criming, assume that any electronic gizmo will collect evidence that can and will incriminate you. (One should probably similarly assume that one leaves DNA everywhere (dead skin, hair, etc.), so doing in-person criming is probably an even worse idea.)
tl;dr – If one tiny company in Israel can sell iPhone cracking and snooping tools to (almost) all comers, it does not seem reasonable that the giant NSA does not have similar capabilities, and more. (We depend on sensible administrations and effective laws and systems to keep that power from being abused.)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Chetan Murthy
This is part of why I believe that if armed resistance becomes necessary, it will need to be organized and led by state/local governments. B/c only in that way, will the writ of state surveillance not be able to find those armed participants.
WTFGhost
@Chetan Murthy: They didn’t mention the soap. I was told a molotov was gas, a glass bottle, and some soap flakes, to gel up the gasoline, so when you lit the fuse, you didn’t experience any horrors before throwing it. Make sure you stuff the neck of the bottle *tightly*, and remember, gas is less viscous than water! Also… um… man. Just to mention, I’ve never actually made one, just, repeating what I’ve heard. From friends.
Fun fact: I was friends with two of the children of the guy who wrote “The Anarchist’s Cookbook.” One, in the army, was ecstatic when they got to grenades. “WHY?” they demanded – he didn’t like rifle drill (he hadn’t had is new corrective lenses issued), but he was wild about grenades. “Why? You don’t get it! I’ve used these before!”
This is also where I got my tagline, “Everything I needed to learn in life, I learned in kindergarten. Like: Once you pull the pin, on Mr. Hand Grenade, he is no longer your friend.”
Baud
@Another Scott:
Thanks for the advice!
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Jerry: The thing that strikes me here is that the Google data was good enough to find the perps but not good enough for the perps to find the other perps that roughed up the one kid and stole hia phone. The potential for those two conditions to be reversed – the right hit occurs and LEOs get the wrong intel – is massive.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@chemiclord: Yes.
YOUR search history.
Which requires a wartant that names YOU.
This was the reverse: who searched this address? Returned data matched to other information to identify the person. BIG gray area there. And that is what the courts all said: not explicitly unconstitutional, but very slippery-slope-y.
Chetan Murthy
I remember reading in Robert Gellately’s masterful _Backing Hitler_ that the Gestapo and Kripo (criminal police) were absolutely -shite- at the job of detecting: they relied almost exclusively on denunciations. Easy to nobble those to screw somebody against whom you’ve got a grudge.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@RepubAnon: Ammosexuals will counter that since the data stewards are private sector that somehow makes it OK.
Mike in Pasadena
I was most alarmed by how inaccurate Apple’s “find my device” software is. Similar uses by other thugs could lead to your home though you did nothing to the searcher, just as happened in Denver. But I’m also concerned by these broad searches pursuant to a search warrant served on Google. A Texas AG convinced of a crime under Texass’ antiabortion law requesting all searches for “abortion clinics” is just one example.
Marc
Just to add more useless info, Find My Device actually works mostly off of low power Bluetooth pings. If another iPhone passing by a gets a ping from a device being located (which can be picked within 30 meters or so range), it tags that device in Apple’s database with it’s own GPS location. That works even when the device being located doesn’t have GPS (or is turned off) like an AirTag. Each tag is just the phone location and Bluetooth signal strength, if you get enough pings from different locations you can approximate the location of the device using triangulation, but it’s unlikely to be as accurate as GPS.
Librettist
For every femicide case high profile enough to make the true crime forums, there are due process trolls. The Venn overlay with “Kamala is a cop” trolls isn’t 100%, but it is pretty damn close.
Cliosfanboy
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq):
Different apps. The perps used the Apple “Where’s My Phone App” and got the wrong house. The cops looked for Google searches of the specific address, and matched them to people who were on their phones in the general area of the crime on the night of the crime. Only a small number of people 1) looked for that address and 2) were in the area of the crime on the night of the fire.
Cliosfanboy
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): Yeah, but they looked for searches of a specific address where the crime was committed, and for a date range close to the night of the crime. That’s pretty specific.
It was also a crime in the jurisdiction where they ran the search. They were not searching for someone who searched for something that was legal in Colorado that’s illegal in Texas.
Slipperly slope, but I think given the restrictions, OK.
chemiclord
@Honoré De Ballsack: Because by and large what GPS is actually doing is anticipating where the device is. It works when you’re driving because your paths are largely set by the road, it has a pretty good gauge of your speed, and thus can project where you are quite accurately.
If you’re not moving, unless GPS has some prior baseline to work with, its placement is much less precise.
chemiclord
@WTFGhost:
Okay… I guess?
I dunno. I just know when I was growing up, the Internet was just becoming a thing, and the general wisdom during that time was “anything you give a third party that doesn’t explicitly say is legally protected information should be assumed isn’t.”
That personally makes sense to me. If I’m Googling something through their public search engine, I do so with the assumption that is not privileged information, and no reason for me to think it should be. Google is not my lawyer. I did not hire them and tell them, “This is information that I am giving to you and you only.”
So no, I am not particularly bothered by the idea of police backtracking something that would potentially include my search information if they are doing so in pursuit of a crime. And yes, they should have to demonstrate that they are, in fact, investigating an actual crime in the state in which they are asking information from.
For sure, there do need to be some rules and laws set on this sort of investigative method… but the method itself should not particularly upset anyone.
hotshoe
@Bill Hicks:
https://archive.ph/EFDZl
looks like the whole article is in archive
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Cliosfanboy: The problem has nothing to do with who published the solution and everything to do with the potential inaccuracy of the results.
Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq)
@Cliosfanboy: That is correct.
But would you be comfortable with someone getting arrested merely for being curious about a house? The potential for misuse of such a search is significant. This case may be fairly clear and precise; the next one may not be. I do not have a problem with how this case was solved – merely with how other cases can lead to incorrect deduction based on coincidental data produced by as wide a dragnet as this.
Gretchen
@Smiling Happy Guy (aka boatboy_srq): That’s the same as saying are you comfortable with someone being arrested just because they were in the vicinity of the crime scene? No, the police have to have more probable cause to arrest someone, and knowing who to look at gives them that chance. They didn’t arrest the delivery driver or the relative who looked up the address.
Iron City
@chemiclord: GPS is not anticipating anything, it is just broadcasts as set of space vehicle information and a time, that’s it. If anything is anticipating anything it is whatever user application and associated hardware is doing with the location and time information it gets from the GPS system.