Referenced in our Newsletter Volume 2, Issue 7 - July 2003
Possible Domestic Terrorist Shooting
The following scenario illustrates the use of VisuaLinks in a suspected domestic terrorism incident. The incident under investigation was a shooting at a large religious institution. After the incident, the only evidence, besides some vague witness accounts, was a retrieved bullet. The bullet was submitted to the FBI for processing. The FBI found the weapon in its ballistics database and returned a make, serial number and purchase information to the investigators. When the gun owner was questioned, he indicated he had reported the gun stolen, but hadn't yet filed a police report.
Investigators queried a local database on the weapon serial number and conducted a first-level walk, yielding the following image:
By walking the data in Figure 12 to a database of subpoenaed financial and telephone records, we see with whom our target has been in contact and his banking transactions two weeks prior to the incident (Figure 13).
Due to the nature of the incident, investigators suspected that the incident had domestic terrorist basis. The following result was against additional databases of known domestic terrorist groups, gang activities and associations. The results are shown in Figure 14:
As can be seen in Figure 14, our target (top row, connected to the original weapon),
shares not only a bank account with persons in the domestic terrorist and gang database,
he has also made telephone calls to other individuals in the database.
Analysis revealed that PERSON 2 made a large cash deposit into the account used by our target.
Most telling, however, is that both the TARGET and PERSON 2 were found to be closely affiliated with a known domestic terrorist group (GROUP).
Investigators concluded that TARGET had purchased the weapon and likely sold it to PERSON 2. For this reason, they suspected PERSON 2 was the shooter and extended the investigation to include him.
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