The homicide investigation was stalled.
Police in the Michigan township of Van Buren had identified a person of interest in the 2017 killing of Egypt Covington, but by 2020, there had been no arrests. Frustrated, her brother and his now-wife began pushing local authorities to hand off the case to state investigators.
That summer, after a protest over the lack of progress and persistent advocacy from the couple, Michigan State Police took over and began unraveling the horrific mystery of who entered Covington’s home, bound her with Christmas lights and fired a single bullet into a pillow pressed against her head.
In an exclusive interview with “Dateline,” one of the state investigators who took over the case pointed to what he described as an overlooked clue that was key to solving the crime — cellphone location data gathered through an investigative technique known as a geofence warrant.
The increasingly popular and much-debated surveillance tool has allowed law enforcement agencies to gather anonymous location data for anyone whose location history is turned on — the setting is off by default — and is in a designated area during a designated time, according to Google. That area could be a one-block radius or several. Investigators use that data to unmask and track a potential suspect’s movements in or around a crime scene as the crime played out.
In Covington’s case, the data helped lead investigators to three men who pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and were sentenced to prison in October.
“That was the first piece of evidence that really broke the case wide open,” one of the investigators, James Plummer, told “Dateline.”
But a recent announcement from the main recipient of most geofence warrants, Google, has left the tool’s future in doubt — and investigators searching for their next source of data in a post-Google world. Throughout 2024, the company said in December, changes will be introduced so that users’ location data is…
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