Too Much, Too Late: A Digital Dragnet for a Homicide
How police used Flock's digital dragnet to investigate a homicide months after critical evidence was lost due to negligence.
On January 29, 2022, Wayne PD received a call from a resident reporting gunshots near his home on Munger Road. Wayne police responded and found blood droplets in the snow, but nothing else. It wasn’t until a more than a month later that a horse-rider discovered Frank’s body — he had been shot 11 times.
On February 8, 2022, Metra Police was still investigating the case as a missing person. They saved screenshots of the man when he appeared in footage captured at the Round Lake Metra Station on the morning of January 29. They do not secure the footage.
When his body was finally discovered—not by police who were called to the location but by a random passer-by—police pulled out all the stops to try to get evidence.
The Events: As told by Cell Phones
Although the ground had thawed, the case had frozen over. Much of the evidence that existed in January was lost by March. The snow melted and took the blood that Wayne PD had ignored with it. The video file Metra PD never bothered to save had long been overwritten. But Frank’s OnePlus cellphone is still on him. Police obtain a search warrant at the same time they notify the family.
The family, who had already been looking for Frank, hand police a cloned phone, his Google password, the name of a suspect—let’s call him Marco—and information about text messages that were suspicious at best.
Frank’s mother had also received a Facebook message from another person, telling her that the people Frank lived with know what happened. Police got a warrant for the sender’s Facebook account.
Police then use the password and information provided by the family and determine that Frank was part of a group that consisted of Frank, Marco, and brothers Sam and Albert.
Location records obtained through cell phone warrants show that on the morning of the 29th, Frank took the train to Grayslake, spent some time there, and then took a bus to Marco’s house in Round Lake Beach.
That same morning, phone records show, Rob and Sam traveled to Hammond, IN, on the Eastern edge of Chicagoland, together.
Around lunchtime, Marco, Rob, and Sam meet up.
They spend some time in the Villa Park area. Sam then travels to Hammond and back while Marco and Rob stay in Villa Park. A few hours later, around 3pm, Sam leaves Villa Park again and returns to his home in Round Lake Beach.
That evening, around 7:30pm, Rob and Marco leave Villa Park to go to Marco’s home in Round Lake Beach. On their way out, they stop at a gas station and meet with a man, Eric. Shortly after they get to Round Lake Beach, Frank, who lives a few blocks away, joins them at Marco’s.
Marco and Rob then drive to Sam’s home, briefly meet up with him, and return to Marco’s home. Frank had stayed there the whole time.
All three then head to the Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin together, around 10pm on January 29th. About an hour later, Wayne PD receives the phone call about multiple gunshots, roughly eight miles from the casino.
Frank had been murdered.
Evidence, Informants, and Raids
When Wayne PD investigates, they decide not to pursue multiple gunshots and fresh blood trails. Thirty-three days later, when Frank’s body is finally found, the casino and the city had already recycled their virtual surveillance video tapes.
Over the next few days, police receive records from the search warrants, and the ATF submits six casings (five .380 caliber and one .40 caliber) to its national database, suggesting that at least two firearms were used.
Two days after the body is discovered, Rob changes his Facebook profile picture to Santa Muerte, Our Lady of Death, wearing a red sash, and imposed against a backdrop of AK-47s. The government has, at times, argued Santa Muerte is “a tool of the drug trade,” but that seems an oversimplification.
Praying to Santa Muerte for protection—including from legal trouble—is practiced in some Mexican traditions, and there is some evidence that some gang members in the United States have picked up this custom—or at least the Santa Muerte imagery.
Rob, Frank, and the others belonged to the Mexican Playboy Sureños (PBS/Sur 13) street gang.
Meanwhile, police continue trawling for evidence beyond the name of the suspect that the family provided. ALPR turns up nothing; with the exception of a Walgreens video showing Rob’s truck driving by, and another business provides video showing some unidentifiable vehicles on the road where Frank’s body was found, they find little.
By mid-March, police apply for a search warrant for all location data from every Android phone in a two kilometer (1.25 miles) radius around the location where Frank’s body was found.
ASA Louis Nuckolls approved the warrant and Judge Mackay signed off on it. Google, however, resisted it and called it overbroad. The company convinced police to narrow it to a much more reasonable 200 meters (~650 feet).
Google provided two phones with “obfuscated device IDs” within that narrowed 200m radius. Police deemed them irrelevant because they were too far from the scene of the crime. They did not investigate these devices further.
Sam was a top contact for both Marco and Rob and had talked to Frank 17 times in the month of January. He was saved in Frank’s phone as “Ced.”
At this time, an anonymous informant tells police that Frank had been “beefing” with his fellow gang members, and that PBS was responsible for Frank’s death. The informant said that a man known as “Cedric” had ordered Frank killed. Another man, “Hammer,” had also been involved. He gave police a street for “Hammer” — the same as Marco’s.
By March 31st, police serve pen register orders on the cell phone provider, and they start live-tracking Rob and Marco’s phone locations.
On April 7, SWAT raids three addresses. At the first, they arrest Marco and seize Albert’s phone. At the second, they arrest Rob and seize his truck.
At the third address, where Frank used to rent a room from Marco’s brother and his partner (who shares a last name with Sam), they arrived at 5am, surrounded the home, and ordered the residents outside. Inside, they find Sam’s elderly father, in a “urine-soaked bed.” The report does not note whether the man’s non-verbal state and immobility was a result of the armed raid.
They interview Marco’s brother (who has a “conejo,” bunny tattoo to signify PBS/Sur 13 membership). They also seize 11 electronic devices and 29 memory cards.
Since then, Marco has been in the DuPage County jail, pending trial.
In 2024, Rob was sentenced to nine years on unrelated drug charges. He does not appear to have been charged or publicly identified in relation to this murder.
There are no reports that Albert or Sal have been arrested or charged.
Marco has a court date set for November 13, 2025.
A Trail Gone Cold, A Dragnet Too Late
The story of this investigation is one of critical, early failures. On January 29, 2022, after a resident reported gunshots, Wayne PD responded, found blood in the snow, and, per media reporting, did nothing more. They did not return. They did not find Frank’s body, which lay just 20–30 feet from the road.
This inaction continued when Frank’s family reported him missing. The family, not the police, provided detectives with a cloned copy of Frank’s cellphone, his Google password, and the name of a suspect, “Marco.” The family even pointed out the suspicious text messages they had found and received.
Despite these critical leads, the file shows a pattern of neglect. On February 8, Metra PD found footage of Frank at the Round Lake station. They saved only screenshots of Frank and allowed the full video file to be overwritten and lost forever.
It wasn’t until a month later, when a random passer-by stumbled upon Frank’s body, that police began an investigation in earnest.
By then, the case was cold. The blood trail was gone, melted with the snow. The virtual surveillance tapes from the Grand Victoria Casino and nearby businesses — which digital forensics would later prove were key locations — had been recycled.
Instead of “good old-fashioned police work”—like searching 30 feet from a blood trail—the state relied on massive, retroactive digital dragnets. They served a geofence warrant for a two-kilometer radius around the crime scene, covering nearly five square miles. It was an act so “overbroad” that Google pushed back and convinced police to narrow the search to 200 meters. Even then, the warrant yielded two “obfuscated device IDs” which police did not deem relevant.
This “too much, too late” approach defined the outcome. The digital information seems to evidence Rob and Sam’s extensive involvement: they were with Frank all day, at the casino just before the murder, and Rob’s phone traveled with Marco’s to the Munger Road area just after Frank’s phone went silent. Despite this data, only Marco was charged.
According to media reporting, the prosecutor alleged at Marco’s arraignment that Marco called “another gang member” immediately after the murder, around 11pm. The file indicates Marco made a 31-second phone call to his roommate Albert at 12:15am, from the Round Lake Beach area, shortly before he arrived home.
However, the file, but not the reporting on the prosecutor’s statements, shows that Rob received a six-second call from a number with a northern Illinois area code at 11:03pm, while Rob and Marco were still in the area where Frank’s body was found. The number is identified in the investigative file, but there is no mention of its owner, or of attempts to find its owner.
The file also shows that there was extensive contact between a number police identify as possibly belonging to Eric, the man from the gas station, in the hour leading up to the murder.
But not any time before or after.
Eric is unable to pick Marco, Rob, or Frank in a photo line-up. He is treated as a witness and is not investigated further.
This investigative file doesn’t tell the story of an under-resourced police department; it tells the story of a well-equipped multi-jurisdictional team of investigators that didn’t bother with a missing persons investigation and let the evidence grow cold.
When they finally acted, their high-tech dragnet was an imperfect substitute, apparently leaving them with a case against one man while the others implicated by the same data faced no charges, or even, by all appearances, any thorough investigation.
Now, to be clear: the harms of mass surveillance notwithstanding, police have a moral duty to use the technology available to them. They should not be faulted merely for using surveillance— in fact, they should have used that capability to find Frank when he was first reported missing, when it mattered most.
But what they also had a duty to do was look for Frank. First, when he was missing. Then, when they found blood while Frank’s lifeless body was a mere twenty feet from the road.
The broad, long-term phone warrants, and especially the ~5 sq. mile search warrant, show that mass surveillance can’t be left unchecked in the hands of police. These warrants need meaningful oversight, not rubberstamping prosecutors and judges or the best moral judgment of multinational corporations.
Mass surveillance is not a substitute for work. Frank’s family was left in the dark for thirty-three days while police and others had video of him. While police found his blood. While they were within mere feet of his dead body.
Marco now sits in jail while others go uninvestigated. “We got him.”
At the end of the day, surveillance technology may be a “force multiplier,” but this case shows that force multiplying zero will always stay zero.
How this story became public reveals an even deeper failure →
A redacted copy of the file is available for download here. As the original file was a single, unformatted blob (from being pasted into a single data field), the version provided has been re-formatted for readability (e.g., restoring line breaks and lists) to more closely match the original document’s structure.
Although this case has previously been reported on, and despite the original source file being public, I chose to redact the file and use aliases in the article. Despite the obvious limitations of this approach, it is an effort to mitigate any potential additional harm, while still illuminating this ongoing problem with Flock and other unregulated surveillance technology.[1]
I first reached out to the DuPage County public defenders’ office, which is defending “Marco,” on October 14, 2025. My call was returned on October 23, with a vague “I’ll look into it.” There is no additional information as of November 8, and the source file remains online.
I reached out to “Rob”'s attorney around the same time in October. He did not return my call.
After receiving the file, the DuPage County Clerk of Court responded: “Case filings may be obtained or viewed in the Clerk’s Office in person or online via dupagecircuitclerk.gov using the i2File or Attorney Access links” (Filings for this case are unavailable online).
More data breach posts are in the works — they’ll be posted here or elsewhere soon. ↩︎