Police Catch Kidnapper Using Dealership’s GPS Device

By: The Washington Post
Feature by Abby Ohlheiser

Local and federal law enforcement officials announced Wednesday that they had rescued a nursing assistant whose violent abduction in Philadelphia was caught on surveillance video. And as police credit that video for its role in finding Carlesha Freeland-Gaither, 22, and her alleged abductor, Delvin Barnes, another sort of surveillance technology also helped lead officials to the suspect and the victim: a GPS device, planted in Barnes’s car by the dealership that sold him the vehicle.

 

Barnes, 37, was arrested in Maryland on Wednesday, three days after Freeland-Gaither was abducted on a Philadelphia street. Freeland-Gaither was with Barnes at the time of his capture in Jessup and was in reasonably good condition, authorities said at a news conference.

 

Officials began to zero in on their location after the victim’s credit card was used near the Maryland-Delaware border.

 

But a major break in the case came from law enforcement in Virginia, where police already were investigating Barnes in a different case. The images of the suspect in the Philadelphia abduction indicated that it might be him.

 

Barnes has a long criminal history and was wanted in Virginia as a suspect in an abduction there.

 

Investigators began tracking the movements of his car — a gray Ford Taurus — through the GPS device. The dealership installed it because of Barnes’s poor credit at the time of purchase.

 

Two detectives working together in neighboring Virginia counties guessed that the car might have such a device after they “noticed a Virginia inspection sticker on the front windshield and a decal from a car dealership in the Richmond area,”as The Post reported Thursday night. The detectives were aware that the dealership placed GPS devices in some of the vehicles it sold.

 

Capt. Jayson Crawley of the Charles City County Sheriff’s Office and Sheriff’s Lt. J.J. McLaughlin III of the New Kent County Sheriff’s Office asked the dealership to activate the device on Wednesday, they told The Post.

 

The dealership complied, and Barnes’s car was located that day in Jessup.

 

Over the past few years, car dealerships — especially those catering to lower-income customers and those with poor credit — have placed GPS devices in the cars they sell, sometimes without the knowledge of the buyer. The practice is controversial.

 

The devices are generally “designed to help the repo man find your car if you stop paying,” the Tampa Bay Times reported in 2013. The devices stay on the car until the loan is paid off.

 

“They don’t want the customer to know that if they don’t pay, they can come find it,” Duane Overholt, a consumer advocate who runs the Web site StopAutoFraud.com, told the Times.

 

In the case of one Florida dealership, customers whose cars were equipped with tracking devices were invited in for a “safety check” after they finished paying, at which time the device was covertly removed, the Times reported.

 

It’s not clear whether Barnes knew about the device in his car.

 

 

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Resource: 
Police Catch Kidnapper Using Dealership’s GPS Device
Police Catch Kidnapper Using Dealership’s GPS Device