Fleeing From Prosecution? Avoid Posting Your Whereabouts to MySpace

There’s a hilarious story today on Washington Post about a criminal making his location and phone known to the police by posting both to his MySpace profile.

What we logically expect for a fugitive is to hide somewhere and try to avoid police and other officials leading a very reserved life. But this was definitely not something a criminal charged with stealing two monkeys in Pennsylvania was prepared to do with his life after fleeing the state and settling in Southern Maryland.

After Steven Labore (19) was arrested in November and then freed on $20K bond, he soon chose to leave the state and hide from authorities. The most hilarious part was that Labore and a friend of his did not actually intend to steal monkeys from the very beginning - they broke into a greenhouse because they heard there was marijuana growing there. But after finding no marijuana in the greenhouse, they probably decided that leaving empty-handed was a bad idea so they decided to grab a couple of monkeys from the greenhouse instead. Unfortunately Labore’s mother was not happy about having monkeys in her possession and decided to return the animals to the Wild World of Animals they belonged to - and this was where the investigation started for both drug addicts.

One of the guys was pleaded guilty to burglary and sentenced to 2-5 years in prison but Labore himself decided that hiding from authorities in another state was a better idea than facing the court. But there was one thing he did not think about - and that was trying not to reveal his location to the authorities.

This was definitely a mistake since the prosecutor working on his case found that the accused actually decided to post his new phone and address to his publicly accessible MySpace page. The amazing part is that the police did not even have to order disclosure of private information - everything the prosecutor needed to do was doing a simple search for the name of the fugitive on MySpace and clicking the correct link from the search results.

Right now the guy is serving a 30-day sentence for driving on a suspended license but will be returned to Pennsylvania this week for proper prosecution.

We have already heard stories about potential employers denying applicant a position because of finding something discrediting this individual in publicly available sections of social networks. Usually the things that you’d better avoid from uploading online for anyone to see are photos and videos from recent parties or other evidence of your questionable behavior or less-than-admirable approach to work or studies.

But this one is yet another example of how careful one should be in handling all the information that is made publicly available online. And criminals should probably figure out they should be careful now that the police is aware social networks exist - but in the meanwhile police will probably be more than happy about MySpace or Facebook offering such handy tools to help authorities locate criminals. And another factor that will probably help the police is that marijuana rarely makes people reasonable.