A man who was under house arrest in Washington, D.C., and was wearing a GPS monitoring device on his ankle managed to evade electronic surveillance and committed murder, police say. Quincy Green, 34, had been arrested on a gun possession charge last April and was not supposed to leave his home, CBS News reported. California-based company Sentinel was responsible for placing a GPS tracking device on his leg, but the technician incorrectly put it on Green’s prosthetic leg and did not realize that it was a prosthesis.
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On May 19, and while at home, Green removed the prosthesis with the tracking device and replaced it with another one he had. Then, Green allegedly went to an area which he had been specifically ordered to stay away from. There, according to the authorities, he shot and killed 44-year-old Dana Hamilton. According to Fox 5 , Hamilton was shot to death on Southern Avenue last month and police had no suspects for six days until someone tipped off police regarding Green’s possible involvement in the murder.
A government technician placed a GPS tracker on a murder suspects PROSTHETIC leg. @AndreaMcCarren has more. https://t.co/VwGdzTgXDC
— WUSA9 (@wusa9) June 22, 2016
When the police were tipped off about who the killer was, it seemed to be a mistake. The suspect appeared to be at his South Capitol Street apartment at the time of the murder, under house arrest.
“I don’t understand how someone could put this device on a prosthetic leg,” Sgt. Matthew Mahl, chairman of the D.C. police union, told the Washington Post . “It is frustrating for us as police officers to have one of our defendants released, especially when talking about dangerous crime like guns–and then to know that the accountability for these defendants isn’t always up to par.”
When viewing the security cameras at the murder scene, authorities could clearly see a man who was limping like Green. The footage was enough to obtain a search warrant, and police ransacked Green’s home, where they recovered a box from the living room. Inside the box was a prosthetic leg with a GPS tracking device. A device record showed that it had barely moved in a 72 hour period, the report stated.
Authorities realized that the technician responsible for attaching the ankle monitor to Green’s leg had made a fatal mistake. Speaking with reporters, the victim’s mother, Lillie Hamilton, was visibly upset and she gave the following statement.
“Why would they put it on a prosthetic leg?!” Hamilton angrily asked. “When it was supposed to go on the person’s real leg? This is the worst that’s really happened to me all my life and I’m 72 years old,” she said.
Law enforcement officials were also questioning how something like this could’ve happened.
“Now we have this young man that goes out and eventually kills someone. What do you say to the family?” Russ Mullins, an Executive Shop Steward at the Fraternal Order of Police, was quoted as saying.
According to Cliff Keenan, director of the D.C. Pretrial Services Agency, nothing like this has happened before.
“This is the first instance where something like this has happened, and the results were tragic,” Keenan explained. “The contract through which we have contracted for services includes putting onto the individual defendants the actual GPS bracelet and one would assume that the person doing the installation would know not to put it on to a prosthetic device, we don’t know what the company has been able to find out about how this happened under these particular circumstances other than it was a violation of protocols.”
Local authorities have launched an internal investigation because of the error. Chris McDowell, director of communications for Sentinel Services, said protocol for Green was “absolutely not” followed.
Green is facing a charge of second-degree murder and a motive for the killing is still unclear.
[Image via Shutterstock]