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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   30943 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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It might not be as hard to catch him as you think. The stories that broke throughout the day were kind of scattershot, but I just saw one on CBS that had a more complete reconstruction of the events. Initial reports said that the shooter escaped on a Citi bike. Assuming at the time that it was a regular pedal bike, you could probably track him down based on that, though it might take quite a lot of legwork. The CBS story said, though, that he arrived to the scene on foot, shot the guy, then ran to a docking station and picked up an ebike, which he then used to escape. These require either an app or a credit card to use, and you can already nail down the station it was taken from and the window of time when it was rented. It gets better, though. While the regular bikes don't have any kind of tracking, the ebikes do. You know know where he returned the bike to, along with the exact escape route. This can be invaluable information if you're looking for clothing, the murder weapon, or any other evidence he may have ditched along the way. I guess there's a chance he could have used a stolen credit card that wasn't cancelled yet, or a stolen phone that happened to have a Citi bike account on it, or some other way of getting the bike, but for all this guy seems to have done right, the getaway plan was fairly stupid.

You can buy stolen or cloned credit cards pretty easily, ditto for burner phones.

Would you even need to do that? Would a pre-paid card bought with cash not be able to do the trick?

Lyft, who operates Citibike, is now saying it wasn't one of theirs. I would surmise he pre-staged a bike that looked like a Citibike and used that.

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