The potential of technology and social media for committing crimes is undeniable, but so it is its potential to serve justice. In this case, police in Nashville, Tennessee, managed to confirm the identity of a robbery suspect through Instagram.
According to the court documents, Kelvin Blaylock was charged with aggravated robbery this Monday for robbing a man at knifepoint.
The suspect arranged a meeting through OfferUp and was identified via Instagram.
The victim told the police that he met Kelvin Blaylock through the app OfferUp, which is a marketplace for buying and selling goods. According to the prosecution, Blaylock was offering a TV for $150 that caught the victim’s attention. They arranged a meeting in a complex apartment located in Tampa Drive, and when the victim showed up, Blaylock invited him to his car to complete the exchange.
It was during this moment that Blaylock pulled off a knife and threatened his victim asking money. He also demanded his victim to transfer him $120 via the mobile payment service called Cash App.
The victim, of course, had no other choice but to comply with the robber’s demands, and – if that weren’t bad enough – he was also injured due to a minor brawl with Blaylock.
Luckily for the victim, he managed to find the Instagram profile of his assaulter, making it easy for the police to effectively identify and locate the suspect, which then led to his arrest. With social media these days keeping a track of where people have been and what they’ve been up to, isn’t too hard to imagine how this came to be.
As of now, Kelvin Blaylock is detained in Davidson County Jail with a $50,000 bond on him, so it seems that the $120 he stole from his victim wasn’t quite worth it.
This is not the first time (and won’t be the last) that social media proves useful to identify crime suspects and bringing them to justice. The other day, a curious case made waves on the internet when a Florida man charged with grand theft commented on his own wanted photo – requested for the photo to be removed.
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