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Student Googles Himself, Finds He's Accused of Murder
University of Florida student Zachary Garcia was more than a little surprised to find out he was wanted for murder after Googling his name. It turns out the police were looking for a different man but had mistakenly used Garcia's photo. From the article: "Investigators originally released a driver's license photo of Zachary Garcia — spelled with an 'A' — but it was Zachery Garcia — spelled with an 'E'— who was charged in connection with the crime."
We were looking for Hitler.
Am I the only one that noticed "NAKED LADIES" on the news bar to the right of the screen at the start of video? I have the whole internet at my fingertips and I'm thinking "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE NAKED LADIES???"
And here I imagined him googling "Coward, Anonymous"
Learn to love Alaska
You laugh, but a man, with the same first and last name as I, was murdered in Jamaica several years ago in a rather brutal fashion: he was decapitated with a machete. He was leading a ring of phone scammers and some of the other members of the ring had a disagreement over the money.
Another man with the same first and last name is serving a prison sentence for weapons charges.
Another man with the same first and last name is a doctor.
Another is a low-budget file directory.
I could go on.
Its fun having a common name.
No, I didn't google myself as a result of this story. I do from time to time when bored with nothing else to do. If you google my name now, you don't get the murder story until very far into the results, but it was among the top results when it happened four or five years ago.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Inbefore the obligatory quote from Terry Gilliam's prophetic movie masterpiece Brazil with the mistake between 'Buttle' and 'Tuttle', and the ensuing pandemonium.
Getting a job? Hell this explains why he couldn't get a date over the last couple of years. Didn't you know that women google you now before going on dates to see if you are some looser or something embarrassing might pop up and shame them in front of their girlfriends?
I had one girl shoot me down because she could fine 20 to 30 others with the same name as mine but not me on a google search. She claimed I was using an alias.
Apparently I stole Microsoft source code and tried to sell it and got busted back in 2004/2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Genovese
I am NOT ILLWILL!!
I am NOT THAT stupid!
The real travesty is not that law enforcement mixed him up with another kid, its that the kid is charged with felony murder because the homeowner of the house he was robbing shot at and killed one of his friends. While I cannot necessarily condemn the homeowner for his act, to charge the three surviving robbers with murder is ludicrous. One teenager paid the highest possible price for his foolish act, and now the criminal justice system is going to destroy three other lives? what the hell Florida? If I jaywalk with three other people and a motor runs over one of us, are the rest of us guilty of vehicular manslaughter?
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
On a complete tangent, reading this article is the first time I've noticed the ugly little details of the "felony murder law".
You'd think that means if you kill someone while committing a felony that you can be charged with murder. That seems somewhat reasonable, although I can think of cases where it would be excessive.
It turns out if you break into a house for a robbery and some other guy that came with you kills someone maybe somewhere else in the house and you didn't even know you can still be charged with murder.
Now, that seems pretty unfair but we find out in this story that they can go even beyond that. In this story a couple of kids break into a house and the homeowner shoots and kills one of them. They then applied this law to charge the other kid with murder!
That's pretty messed up.
This is a funny mistake but... you know... at least it was the civilian police, and civilian courts.
He should be glad his last name isn't El Masri: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri:
On a related note, a friend of mine recently found he had a warrant for issues that are besides the point. Lets just say, dubious charges of a domestic nature. So, upon finding this out, and verifying it, he drove to a friends place to "lay low" while he calls his lawyer and figures what to do next. The advice he got? Interestingly.... go to the court house in the AM and surrender directly to the court. In this case, that meant he a) looked responsible to the judge b) got it over with quickly and c) denied the police (who had only heard the other side of the story) no chance to "recommend bail".
In the end, he walked out on his on recognizance. (well, end of the day, if not the story)
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I can empathize with the shock of finding out you're wanted for something this severe that you have absolutely no involvement in. While we lived outside of the US, my brother had his car stolen, so we reported it to the police that very night.
A couple of weeks later, a magazine notorious for reporting on gory crimes with graphic photos (at the time, everyone joked that "blood leaked out of the magazine if you squeezed it hard enough") had both my brother and myself accused as murderers in a crime that involved the stolen vehicle. It turns out that a receipt they found in the vehicle had my brother's name and my family's phone number. It took a while to determine that the victim was related to the author of the article, and after talking with the police, we were able to clear our names and get a retraction printed.
While searching for my own name I found out someone in the same town with the same name was sentenced to 50 years in prison. The guy was nailed for possession of about 3 kilo's of cocaine. The intent to distribute was pretty obvious. Let's just say none of my old friends or girlfriends have ever contacted me since.
Which brings up a nifty scenario if you don't want to be contacted by old girlfriends. Just find a state vs drug dealer affidavit online somewhere, fill in the blanks with you name, create your own legal sounding domain name, and post it. Private reg on the dns is a good idea. This happened to me coincidentally but I was thinking it would work exactly the same if I did it to myself on purpose. It's not illegal to make a hoax directed towards yourself right? It works surprisingly well.
1. Old hats will not take the trouble to wade through the justice system to find your contact info.
2. They probably wouldn't want to after reading your affidavit anyway.
Make social engineering statements in the affidavit to deter old hat resurrection. For female deterrent add things like "hit girlfriend and mother in the face with large bludgeoning tool (baseball bat)". For male deterrent add things like "stabbed neighbor in the testicles with a hunting knife".
I had one girl shoot me down because she could fine 20 to 30 others with the same name as mine but not me on a google search. She claimed I was using an alias.
You may not believe me, but you dodged a bullet.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Better yet...here is the intersection of This Way & That Way.