Ankle monitor pings digital path to New Orleans murder
“It’s senseless. Barbaric. I’ve never seen anything like that in my twenty plus years on the job,” NOPD Homicide Commander Capt. Kevin Burns said.
In a city ravaged by murder, the Lundi Gras shooting of a 21-year-old New Orleans man and his Uber driver stands out as especially vicious.
Not only was the intended target, Johnell Hampton, gunned down in a moving car, 35-year-old Uber driver and social worker Andrew Stiller was also shot multiple times. And as Stiller’s car crashed onto Interstate-10, bullets continued to fly, leaving a woman in grave condition with a gunshot wound to the head and two others badly hurt in the wreck.
“It’s senseless. Barbaric. I’ve never seen anything like that in my twenty plus years on the job,” NOPD Homicide Commander Capt. Kevin Burns said.
A Digital Path An ankle bracelet left an electronic trail
Aided by technology, homicide detectives quickly zeroed in on a suspect. Tyree Quinn, 33, was booked with two counts of second-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder in the shooting. Quinn is now being held on bail of $2.8 million.
Court records show that Quinn, a career criminal who served prison time from convictions in both Jefferson and Orleans parishes, was already awaiting trial after he was booked in November with armed robbery, auto theft and being a felon with a gun.
Despite a judge setting Quinn’s bail at a relatively steep amount of $225,000, somebody stepped in and paid a bail bond company to get Quinn out of jail. To make sure Quinn didn’t skip court, the bail company had him placed on an electronic ankle monitor.
Ultimately, that ankle bracelet left an electronic trail that detectives say helped them place Quinn at the scene of the Lundi Gras shooting.
“We do have some information that he was wearing an ankle monitor. And it absolutely aided in this investigation with his apprehension,” Burns said.
Matt Dennis is one of the owners of the electronic monitoring company Assured Supervision Accountability Program, or ASAP. Dennis and his company openly share the electronic tracking of their ankle bracelet with law enforcement.
In the Quinn case, he revealed exclusively to WWL-TV the electronic trail that, looking back in time, appears to reveal a path to a murder scene.
The precision of the GPS technology actually places Quinn's ankle bracelet on the grass next to the I-10 at Bundy Road at 5:31 p.m. on Feb. 20, the precise location and time of the murders.
“That one ping is one of the saddest pings you can ever look at,” said Dennis, showing how the minute-by-minute location of the ankle bracelet can be tracked on a computer screen.
Tracking A Murder Following the path before and after the killing
The electronic ping at the time of the shooting shows up as a single dot on the screen. But what it depicts is the horrifying reality of a cold-blooded killing and several families still staggered by grief.
“And that’s where my husband died. It's exactly where his location was,” said Stiller’s widow Melissa, choking back tears. “He was murdered two days before our one-year wedding anniversary.”
“They shoot them on the interstate. It’s crazy. It’s madness. But this is where we are,” Dennis said.
The affidavit for Quinn’s arrest warrant shows that homicide detectives pieced together several different types of technology in addition to the ankle monitor.
First, surveillance video revealed the license plate of the Nissan Sentra used by Quinn and the other three attackers. With that, detectives traced the path of the car through several license plate readers. Footage from a surveillance camera appeared to show images of Quinn with the car.
Once Quinn was identified by the detectives as a suspect, the electronic trail of his ankle monitor shows the location of Quinn's bracelet minute-by-minute. Detectives say they have, tragically, tracked a murder.
“It's eerie,” Dennis said. “You know, you’re not watching a TV show. You’re watching what’s real. And you know right away what’s happening. And you captured that piece of people’s lives forever as dots on a screen.”
Following the path of Quinn's ankle monitor before and after the killing is revealing – and harrowing.
After driving around New Orleans East for several hours, Quinn ends up outside of an apartment building in New Orleans East. The computer tracking of his ankle bracelet shows he remained in one place for 24 minutes.
“They're clearly sitting and waiting. Clearly sitting and waiting,” Dennis said. “Clearly they intended to kill somebody that day, because that appears to be what it looks like. They go ahead of time. They get there. They wait. It doesn’t seem to be an altercation. It just seems to be a pure, he leaves and they kill him. Did they plan to kill that Uber driver? Did their plan go crazy halfway through? I don’t see how a plan to kill somebody can go as planned. So, I mean, it’s just sad. That’s the way these things play out.”
In another piece of this murder puzzle, WWL-TV previously revealed that the assumed target, Johnell Hampton, was himself out on bail, awaiting trial on charges of being an accessory to attempted second-degree murder from a brutal attack in the French Quarter in January 2022. He was a SUNO student, and he was scared.
“He was just afraid to be swept up in this whole tragic thing,” Hampton’s attorney Michael Idoyaga said in an exclusive interview.
Quinn's electronic trail after the shooting shows that within 60 seconds of the Feb. 20 shooting, the ankle bracelet tracks onto the interstate at Crowder Boulevard. Within a couple of minutes, it hits more than 100 miles an hour.
“The dots can tell a story, but, you know, it's a tough story,” Dennis said.
For the rest of that night and into the morning, the ankle monitor can be seen criss-crossing the city for several hours. The dots on the computer screen stop moving at 1:17 a.m. and at an apartment complex in the New Orleans East. The GPS signal from the bracelet remains there for 12 hours.
'He wasn't answering' A wife's fear grows.
Over the same period, Melissa Stiller's fear was growing by the minute. Using her own technology – a smart phone – she races to where she sees her husband's phone is pinging.
“I knew something was wrong. I was calling his phone. He wasn’t answering,” Stiller said.
On her phone, she can see her husband’s exact location. On her way to New Orleans, she calls to see if there have been any accidents. She calls the police. Finally, she gets a call back.
“They told me, hold on, we need to transfer you to homicide,” she recalled, holding back tears. “Homicide? What?”
Now, she’s left with photo albums of their one magical year together, some of his ashes in a fresh tattoo, and memories of her final words to her husband: “Okay, baby, I love you. Careful. See you when you get home.”
As Quinn remains locked up on a $2.8 million bail, police say they are still trying to identify Quinn's three accomplices.
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