[theme music]
PJ VOGT: From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vogt.
ALEX GOLDMAN: And I'm Alex Goldman.
SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And--
PJ: And you are Sruthi Pinnamaneni, as far as I know.
SRUTHI: (laughs) Yeah. I'm here with a story. Um so a year ago, I read this article about bounty hunters, and there’s this one line in it that said, "Bounty hunters are now finding almost 90 percent of their fugitives," which I thought sounded like a really high number.
PJ: Yeah.
SRUTHI: In this article, they say, "The success rate has a lot to do with technology for skip tracing, the term of art for locating a man on the lam.”
PJ: A man on the lam.
SRUTHI: A man on the lam. So this is a thing, like there’s this whole group of people. They’re called skip tracers, because the people they’re looking for are called skips.
[MUSIC]
And they’ve apparently gotten so good at tracking people’s digital trails that-- no matter who you are-- if you try to hide, they can find you. So like there's a story that just totally captured my heart, which is this one guy he was trying to find the skip who was known to have a particular, a taste for 7-Eleven Slurpees.
PJ: Uh huh.
SRUTHI: And this guy, he got this database of all the video footage from all the local 7-Elevens. And he ran this, like, facial recognition software--
ALEX: Oh come, on really?
SRUTHI: --and, like, found which 7-Eleven the skip had most recently frequented, and staked it out, and caught the guy coming out with a Slurpee.
ALEX: This sounds very much like an episode of Bones or something.
SRUTHI: (laughs) I--
PJ: An episode of Bones?
ALEX: It sounds so ridiculous.
PJ: I’ve never watched Bones.
ALEX: I've seen every episode.
SRUTHI: So I, of course, wanted to follow one of these skip tracers while they did their job. So I did, and I ended up in this story. It is possibly-- no, it is definitely-- the most challenging, weird story I’ve ever worked on.
PJ: OK.
SRUTHI: And it centers around this one, very tragic thing that happened in 2011. I spoke to a woman who was there that night.
SRUTHI: Um, so just start by telling me actually, your name and, um, who you are.
CHRIS: OK, my name is Chris Storie, and, um, I’m uh, from North Carolina, and, um, my brother’s name was Joe Storie.
So it was early October, and Chris remembers it as this cool fall day...
[MUSIC]
...Which started out really nice. She and her brother Joe, and Joe’s whole family, they were on vacation in this place called Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina.
CHRIS: We had gone out, um, there were several- several of us that went down, the guys went fishing on the head boat and the girls went shopping. So, I don’t like shopping, so I went fishing with the guys.
SRUTHI: Mhmm.
CHRIS: Um, you know just caught some fish, he caught a croaker fish, and of course it was making a croaking noise, (laughs) he put it right in my face actually. And um, and so we just- we really spent some quality time that day.
Later that evening, they all pile into a pickup truck to go to dinner. And at exactly 7:32 p.m., they’re crossing this one intersection when this Chevy Lumina blows a flashing red light, and ends up directly in front of them.
CHRIS: And we actually t-boned him. And they said we hit him and the truck went up in the air and flipped over, uh, I- three times and landed flat on its top. They really don’t know how I made it, because I went through the back window of the truck and landed underneath the truck. Like, they said the only thing sticking out was my feet.
Joe, who was in the front seat, he was killed instantly. The cops tell Chris the guy driving the other car, his name is Luis Rodriguez, he’s an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, and he was driving drunk, so they arrest him.
And then, right away, two pretty crazy things happen.
So, number one, Luis is in the hospital, he was also in-injured in the accident, but the police aren’t watching his room. So he escapes, like just walks right out.
Number two, police catch him and bring him to jail, but then the judge reduces his bail, and he pays like $7,500 and just walks out.
PJ: But he'd already fled once?
SRUTHI: Right. And Chris said she felt as if she would never see him again. And so, the day he posted bail, she made sure that she was there.
CHRIS: I rushed outside of the courtroom doors so that I could meet him, to talk to him.
SRUTHI: Mhmm.
CHRIS: And I did, and I told him, I said, "I want you to know what kind of man you took from my family. He has three sons. I- I can't talk to my brother, I can't pick up a phone and call him,” I said. "Because of you," and he turned around and looked at me and said, "Talk to my attorney."
That's the last time she ever saw him.
PJ: He disappeared again?
SRUTHI: Yeah, he didn’t show up for his next court date, totally vanished. And Chris told me, that this time, the authorities just didn’t seem that interested in finding Luis, and so she actually starts looking for him.
[MUSIC]
Um, she has this mugshot of him. Um, he's this guy in his 40s, light green eyes, buzzcut, has this scar on his temple. And so she takes this, and she starts going to his old neighborhoods, like making friends with the people he used to know. And then she’s driving-
PJ: Is she like explaining why she’s there?
SRUTHI: Yeah. I think a lot of them felt sympathetic towards her, and they’re trying to help her. And then she starts driving to different towns where she’s a heard a rumor that he might be living there now.
CHRIS: We took his picture to convenience stores and said, "Have you seen this man?" And this-this-- several of the store clerks were like, "Yes, I've seen him, he comes in here."
Chris said that it’s been five years of this. Five years of looking for Luis Rodriguez every day, always convinced that she just missed him.
CHRIS: I’ve had--I've lost friends before because they've said, "You know, Chris, you're gonna have to find something that makes you happy, again." But I can't--I can't let it go. Joe was too important. The fact that someone is out there, they killed my brother, knows they devastated a family, and does not even care...Does not even care--that I cannot let go of. And I want him caught.
Last December, Chris finally got some help. In the form of a skip tracer named Michelle Gomez.
[MUSIC]
I talked to bounty hunters who told me, “Michelle is a legend.” Like, this 4’11", Mexican-American woman in this field of big, white dudes. They said she’s found con men that the FBI couldn’t. She’s found stolen yachts, stolen oil tankers, a prized Arabian stallion.
And now she’s going to find Luis Rodriguez, and she’s doing it pro bono.
And so, I flew down to Texas, went to her house in this small town called Lockhart, which is like, 30 minutes south of Austin.
SRUTHI: Hi, Michelle.
MICHELLE: How are you doing?
SRUTHI: Good! It was quite an adventure to get here.
[dogs barking]
Michelle brings me into her house. It’s 8 a.m.
MICHELLE: Girl it was hell sleeping last night. I had to get [indistinct] and put them on my feet.
SRUTHI: Oh, cause you were sick.
MICHELLE: Yeah, and I never get--I never get congested, so I had Nyquil.
She’s eating her breakfast, which is a box of Girl Scout cookies: Samoas. And I ask her, “Were you a Girl Scout?” And she said, “No, but I did have to dress up as one once to take down this drug trafficker.”
[phone rings]
I had a lot of questions. But Michelle’s phone just kept ringing. All these calls about different cases...
MICHELLE: (on the phone) And according to Jimmy’s statement last night… And I usually don’t guarantee everybody, but I find everybody, if you know what I mean.
MALE VOICE: Ah, OK, OK--
Finally, an hour and a half later, she says, “OK. let’s sit down. Let’s find this Luis Rodriguez.”
MICHELLE: Luis Rodriguez. Here’s everything. OK. Let me put this over there
We sit down in front of her old desktop computer.
MICHELLE: Um, where’s my glasses?
Her little dog jumps into her lap.
MICHELLE: OK. Tansy, you need to go over there mama.
So, here’s how Michelle plans to find Luis: He’s undocumented. He’s not going to show up in most official databases. So instead, she’s going to look for someone close to him.
MICHELLE: I want to know who is supporting him. He's hiding behind somebody that- with an established name, or with some kind of establishment period, that has financial means to help him.
SRUTHI: She calls this person “shelter.” Here’s what that means:
Michelle says, “Listen, I’ve found, located tons of people who are undocumented. I live in an area where there’s lots of undocumented people, and I have a few friends who are undocumented. And all of them have the same problem. Like, how do you rent a house or lease a car if you don’t have the right documents.”
And she says, the way they do it is they have a trusted friend, with the right papers, who does it for them.
PJ: That’s their shelter.
SRUTHI: That’s their shelter. So, if she can find Luis’ shelter, she can find Luis. So, she starts with the one clue she has, which is this six-year-old police report.
SRUTHI: What's on the police report?
MICHELLE: The accident date. The parties involved. The vehicles in question.
SRUTHI: Um, she’s scanning through the report and suddenly she says, "Hey! Look at this."
The car that Luis Rodriguez was driving, that Chevy Lumina, is registered to a company. So she's like, "Who runs that company?" She Googles, and she gets this name.
MICHELLE: His name is Thomas [BEEP]. I need to see who [BEEP] is. What, what kind of work he does. Is he able to financially help this guy?
SRUTHI: Just a quick note: we took steps to obscure or change identifying details about certain people in this story.
Okay so, Tomas. She puts him into this database, her go-to spot, it’s called, “Find My Skip.” Um-
PJ: Can anybody be on "Find My Skip" or it is it just--
SRUTHI: No.
PJ: Right.
SRUTHI: She was so secretive about it.
MICHELLE: You're watching, you can't put this on here.
SRUTHI: No.
SRUTHI: It's a lot of sensitive information in there. But the outside of it looks like this...
PJ: Oh it looks!
ALEX: Oh wow. There's like a, there's like a dimly-lit street.
PJ: It's like a very, it's a noir black and white photograph.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah.
SRUTHI: It says, "Get ready. Set. Find."
ALEX: Wow.
SRUTHI: Yeah.
PJ: And so what happens when she gets into it?
MICHELLE: Um, let’s go here. There’s so much information here.
SRUTHI: Mhmm.
SRUTHI: So she puts in Luis’ friend’s name, and immediately, the database just starts spitting out tons of addresses.
MICHELLE: Um, when I see so many addresses like that, it gives me a flag that they've been evicted or they're constantly moving so they can avoid being captured.
Michelle says that shelter should look, on paper, like an upstanding citizen. So, suddenly she’s doubting this friend would be shelter. Also, the friend has all these different social security numbers.
MICHELLE: Another social, another social, with different date of births.
SRUTHI: Oh, these are all different socials, so could they be different people? MICHELLE: No.
SRUTHI: No?
MICHELLE: I know they're not. Because this guy, he's illegal.
SRUTHI: So, Michelle told that the way someone who's undocumented could end up with all these socials is there’s this whole system, like these illegal spots that would be hidden, say, in the back of an electronics store.
MICHELLE: Little hubs, little offices, that they--you can pay anywhere from $500 or $2,000, $3000. And they get all their paperwork. Their socials, their ITIN.
SRUTHI: OK.
MICHELLE: They're all over the place. And they're private. If I were to go one, and I'm like, "Oye," and they're pretty much all Spanish. "I was recommended to come over here?" "Who sent you?" That name better be in the rolodex, because if it's not, they're not going to help me, for nothing.
SRUTHI: So, Michelle moves on from this friend. He may have lent Luis his car, but he’s not the shelter, she thinks. But one of the friend’s known associates catches her eye. This woman.
MICHELLE: So here we have, um, Blanca (beep)
SRUTHI: Mhmm.
[MUSIC]
SRUTHI: She thinks this is the friend's wife. Same last name, lived at the same address.
MICHELLE: So we know they're a match, Bonnie and Clyde.
SRUTHI: Oh!
MICHELLE: See her social?
SRUTHI: Mhmm. So now I have another live social to play with because, usually the woman takes care of--the bills.
SRUTHI: Michelle’s starting to develop a theory. Luis and his friend are both using the friend’s wife as shelter.
But, of course, for this theory to be correct, that wife, Blanca has to look legit. So Michelle goes over to Find My Skip, and looks up Blanca. And immediately she sees, unlike her husband, Blanca has just one social security number. Which is good.
MICHELLE: She's got to stay clean. She cannot be--afford to have any evictions. Because they, they live under her social. That's what I mean, shelter, she's their shelter.
SRUTHI: Very quickly she finds a phone number associated with that address.
MICHELLE: Look at this! So I'm going to call her on my trapline.
SRUTHI: So that means...
MICHELLE: It's another number.
SRUTHI: ...She can't--she can’t see you.
MICHELLE: I'm going to use it--honestly, I'm going to use an Austin number. [phone rings]
MICHELLE: So, she didn’t answer.
SRUTHI: Which I thought was a bad thing. But it wasn’t.
MICHELLE: And that’s ok. But I know it’s a live number.
SRUTHI: Yeah, yeah.
MICHELLE: Um, so what we're going to do is--I need to go to Melissa Data.
SRUTHI: The question Michelle wants to answer now is: Is this still Blanca's number? Like does she still live at this address?
She takes Blanca’s personal information, and just starts plugging into every conceivable local municipal database. Like, the websites that Blanca would use for like, local like, electricity company, the water company. She’s basically pretending to be Blanca, so that one of these websites will, like, just confirm for her, “Yes Blanca’s here and paying her bills.”
MICHELLE: Yes, OK. Oh my god I hate this shit. OK. First name, last name, company name. Here. [Yawns]
[MUSIC]
SRUTHI: So at this point it’s 4 p.m. We’ve been sitting in the front of the computer since the morning. And the next several hours is just watching Michelle try database after database.
MICHELLE: [dog yaps] Tansy, be quiet, Mia.
SRUTHI: I mean just to give you an example, she spends at least 40 minutes at this one deed registration site for, like, Suffolk County, North Carolina, just filling out forms. And then when she hits enter, it takes you back to the homepage.
PJ: (laughs) Oh, god.
ALEX: (Ufff.)
SRUTHI: And my eyes are totally glazed over, but for Michelle, it’s almost like she was in a stakeout. She was a cop, in her car, looking at these websites in a way that she was like “Ok, something’s about to happen right now.”
PJ: What is she eating the whole time?
SRUTHI: She does not eat.
PJ: Is she drinking coffee?
SRUTHI: No. She has her chihuahua on her lap. Her cat was sitting directly in front of the computer screen.
PJ: (laughs)
SRUTHI: Like literally in front.
ALEX: That's cute.
SRUTHI: And she would just work around the cat.
PJ: (laughs)
MICHELLE: Come on, little one
SRUTHI: It’s kind of like having kids who are all over you
MICHELLE: Uh huh. Let’s see. Property tax registry 2. Tax administration, property sales. Um, let’s go here.
[MUSIC]
SRUTHI: It’s 6 p.m., the sun goes down. It’s 7 p.m., it’s 8 p.m. We barely talk. We skip dinner, and then, at 9:05 p.m., she’s on this county website where you pay your property taxes.
MICHELLE: Ok. I’m going to act like I’m paying my bill. Owner 1, owner 2. SRUTHI: Oh here!
MICHELLE: Oh my god!
SRUTHI: And the website spits out these property taxes.
MICHELLE: Wow. Look! (sings) Duh, duh duh duh.
[MUSIC]
She's got two houses in her name. These people, when they come to America, they invest in the land. OK? They invest whatever they get. Look she drives 2 oh 2--oh fuck yeah--2002 Toyota Camry, paid. I gotta print this out.
SRUTHI: Blanca, it turns out, paid the taxes on these two houses and car last month.
PJ: So she's there.
ALEX: So, she's definitely there.
PJ: And not only is she there, either she's like, she's pretty wealthy, or she's shelter. Like a lot...
SRUTHI: Yeah.
PJ: ...She's making a lot of purchases that could be for other people.
SRUTHI: For other people, exactly--so there might be multiple people living in the home with her. And Michelle believes that one of those people could be her subject, Luis Rodriguez
[MUSIC]
She has the skip in her sights.
BREAK
ALEX: Welcome back to the show. Before the break, Michelle felt like she had a very good idea of where Luis was hiding
SRUTHI: So now Michelle needs someone local, like someone in North Carolina, to just gather more information.
[MUSIC]
(on phone)
MICHELLE: Hi Michael, how you doing?
MICHAEL: Alright, what's going on?
She calls a bounty hunter she knows in North Carolina
MICHELLE: Sorry to call you over there, it's 10:30 over there, right?
MICHAEL: Yeah, you're fine.
MICHELLE: Okay, you’re--are you close to
They both pull up Blanca’s address on Google Earth.
MICHELLE: This thing does not give me--
MICHAEL: I'm looking at satellite view.
MICHELLE: Ok, me too.
MICHAEL: Oh shit yeah! This is a trailer park.
MICHELLE: Oh really? That's fucking Honduran country.
MICHAEL: Oh yeah? That's a big damn trailer park too, golly.
And she says, "Hey listen, I need you to go and root through the garbage." Basically she wants to see what mail is coming into that house, like, who is actually living in the house? Because maybe Luis Rodriguez is getting mail.
PJ: Right.
ALEX: Right.
SRUTHI: And, also, she sends him a photo of Luis Rodriguez.
MICHELLE: Yeah and if you see that Honduran there, shit.
She says, “When you see him, don’t do anything, I want to be the one who catches him.” And right away, she’s like planning her trip to North Carolina. She says it’s going to take a couple of weeks.
PJ: So like, at that point does she call the family and say like, "I think I've got your guy."
SRUTHI: No. Michelle has actually never spoken to Chris Storie or anyone in Joe's family. She’s never met them, doesn’t know them.
ALEX: But aren’t they the people that hired her?
SRUTHI: No. Michelle, at first, she hadn’t wanted to tell me who her client was, she said she had to get that person’s permission. It turns out that she was hired by this group called The Remembrance Project. And The Remembrance Project, it’s run by a woman named Maria Espinoza. You probably haven’t heard of her, but--
ALEX: I have not.
SRUTHI: You know, I think she actually prefers it that way. Like she doesn’t talk about herself much. But, I think you’ve seen her at least once.
[MUSIC]
Do you remember just a few days after Trump took office, he signed that big executive order. It’s the one where he’s saying he’s going to build a wall.
[Video of President Trump's executive order]
The dark haired woman standing right behind while he’s signing, that’s Maria Espinoza. There’s actually this video of her, let me just pull it up. It’s her giving congressional testimony earlier this year.
MARIA ESPINOZA: My name is Maria Espinoza, my testimony is based upon my nearly 8 years of traveling across the country with the Remembrance Project, an organization that advocates for those families whose loved ones are killed by illegal aliens.
SRUTHI: You see her, and she’s in this crisp blue blazer, and she’s neatly laying out this picture of America that she has seen in her travels. One that is violent and unsafe.
MARIA: Based upon preliminary information, we believe that the American stolen lives may number in the tens of thousands.
Five years after Chris Storie’s brother died, she got a call from Maria, who she didn’t know. And, Maria says, “Hey listen, will you come and tell your story at this big event that I’m organizing?”
CHRIS: And I tell you what, at first, I told her no, I didn’t want to go.
SRUTHI: And why did you say no?
CHRIS: Because I get--you know, when I talk about it a lot, it does upset me, and it does--I think with the PTSD, it kinda sends me back in a tailspin kinda. But I did, I went and I’ll tell you what, that’s one of the best things I have ever done.
SRUTHI: Chris ends up flying to Houston to be a part of Maria’s, she calls it the “stolen lives quilt.” It’s not actually a quilt, it’s a line of family members who stand behind her while she’s giving a speech, and they’re holding up pictures of the people they’ve lost. When Chris arrived, she said that Maria was so welcoming.
CHRIS: She had never met me, but it’s like--I mean, they knew about my family, they knew my brother’s name, it’s not like they got mixed up about which family member you were, or, you know? You know, it’s just like you were special. SRUTHI: And it felt sincere?
CHRIS: Oh yes. Yes, definitely.
SRUTHI: I wanted to understand Maria’s interest in Chris and in Luis Rodriguez. I asked her to do an interview, at first she was hesitant, but there were negotiations, finally she agreed. So this past March we talked at her house in DC, her husband Tim was there too. The two of them, they started The Remembrance Project together, and they told me that before that, they used to spend their time fundraising for childhood diseases. Like they were not particularly politically active
MARIA: In fact, we hadn't attended a town hall, I think, until after we got involved, so we were not---
TIM: Political.
MARIA: So we weren't political.
TIM: What we were doing is just kind of living our lives. You know Maria was helping kids who have cancer. She was helping kids with spina bifida. I was--I was designing roads, bridges in Texas. And so at the time before we kind of were awakened by this news that we saw, we were like most people, who were thinking our representatives were taking care of business for us.
The news that Tim’s referring to just then, it’s actually one specific news story from September of 2006.
NEWS CLIP: Officer Rodney Johnson will be buried on Wednesday, he was murdered, allegedly by this man, Juan Leonardo Quintero.
It was the second time within a year that an undocumented immigrant had shot a cop in Texas. And Tim and Maria said they were wondering if there was some kind of pattern.
MARIA: I called around the police department and tried to find information out; they wouldn’t give me information.
TIM: So then I noticed that if I would just Google “child killed by immigrant” — and story after story after story. And so I started documenting that on a spreadsheet.
These sorts of stories — they’re the kind you find on Breitbart now. But not back then. Back then, many mainstream Republicans were pro-immigration, they didn’t want to risk the Hispanic vote and these victims were evidence in an argument that basically nobody wanted to make.
And so, Tim and Maria, when they start calling the people on the spreadsheet, they find themselves on the phone with people who maybe hadn’t even shared their stories before. Next thing they knew, according to Maria, she’s meeting them for coffee, even going along with some of them to murder trials. And she says it just became her life.
SRUTHI: I'm just curious like, there's a world in which you could've said, "You know what, we're gonna just keep working with fundraising, with these kids that have this terrible disease. Why not focus on them? Why this?
MARIA: Well, I think one point: this issue is forever, it’s permanent. And it’s just ... make me cry. (light sobs)
SRUTHI: It’s ok to cry.
MARIA: No. (clears throat)
SRUTHI: We can wait a moment.
MARIA: Thanks, honey. I think that--
SRUTHI: Is it a particular story, Maria, that you think of when you get emotional? MARIA: All of them I guess, it is huge--because we know so many of the families. SRUTHI: Yeah.
MARIA: And it’s not something I wanted to do. However, if they’re suffering through it, why can’t we just go and listen, we’re not even, you know, directly affected. Um … and, you know, some of these cases, you know, a 14-year-old girl just shot in the back five yards from her safety, from her home, from her gate. And then a mother of five, stabbed in the heart with a three-inch knife over wanting to hijack her.
SRUTHI: Can I, can I--when people talk about crime within the immigrant population, like legal or illegal, they say, statistically on the whole, there's far less crime in these communities and therefore like particular anecdotes, it doesn't speak to a larger group.
MARIA: Well, two things. What the report has done is mixed immigrant crime and illegal alien crime.
What Maria’s referring to there is this big government report that came out in 2011.
MARIA: And that’s absolutely wrong. False. No. So, we’re concerned about illegal aliens who commit crime, and with someone like Chris Storie’s case, that takes place more often than you’d think.
So this question of how often. Like, how many times last year did undocumented immigrants commit crimes? This turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. Like, we’re not even sure exactly how many undocumented immigrant are even in the US. I talked to several people, academics, statisticians, think tanks like across the political spectrum, and none of them could agree on a number. They did agree that Maria’s numbers-- tens of thousands of criminals-- are just way too high.
But the thing that Maria has discovered is that you don’t even have to worry about the numbers when you have these horrifying stories. They’re powerful. They become a weapon in the right hands.
(APPLAUSE)
And in 2015, Tim and Maria finally met someone who wanted to use it.
[MUSIC]
TRUMP PHOENIX RALLY: I have met with many of the great parents who lost their children to sanctuary cities and open borders. So many people, so many many people. So sad. They will be joining me on the stage in a little while …
Three weeks after Trump announced his candidacy, he and Maria and the families, they met in private. And then he is giving all of these speeches with the backdrop of Remembrance Project families like standing behind him.
At this other event in Houston, he’s talking about the criminals sneaking across the border, and killing people, and at one point, he actually turns around and looks straight at the families -- including, like Chris Storie was there -- and he makes them this promise.
DONALD TRUMP: The many individuals who have committed crimes, but escaped justice, fled the jurisdiction, or were otherwise never caught--and many of the folks are in that position, where you even sometimes know where they are, and they’re never caught. We're going to catch them. We're going to catch them.
[MUSIC]
SRUTHI: In the weeks after Trump won the election, Maria and Tim decided that the time was right to try something new. They would find one of these guys, like one of these immigrants who’d committed a crime, and gotten away.
They pick their first case: Luis Rodriguez, the man who five years ago fled after being arrested for killing Chris Storie’s brother.
Tim and Maria wanted to help Chris find justice, sure. But Luis has a value beyond that; as a poster child in the larger war they’re waging.
So now, the best skip tracer in the world, Michelle Gomez is hunting Luis Rodriguez. It's no longer just one gig for a bounty hunter or a family seeking closure, it's part of something bigger now.
In Part II, Michelle goes to North Carolina to complete her mission.
DALLAS: There’s the mom and the other one.
MICHELLE: That’s her, that’s the daughter Blanca’s daughter
DALLAS: There’s the dog, he’s no problem.
Credits
Reply All is hosted by PJ Vogt and me, Alex Goldman. The show is produced by Sruthi Pinnamaneni, Phia Bennin, Damiano Marchetti and Austin Mitchell. Additional production help by Jon Hanrahan. Our editor is Tim Howard, our intern is Anna Foley, fact checking by Michelle Harris. We were mixed by Rick Kwan and Kate Bilinski.
Extra special thanks this week to Hans Linnartz, "Scott" MacLean III, Alfonso Aguilar, Walter Ewing, Alex Nowrasteh, Susan Long, Michelle Mittelstadt, Don Rosenberg, Frank Bean, Charis Kubrin, Steven Camarota, Joslyn Johnson, Nelson Votaw, Ryan Pfeifle, Nick Kulish, Chloe Prasinos, and Emily Kennedy.
Matt Lieber is when you are just sitting on the couch flipping through the channels and you find a movie you haven’t seen in a long time and you just sit there and watch the whole thing. Our theme song is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and our ad music is by Build Buildings. Our website is replyall.ninja. You can listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.
Sruthi Pinnamaneni follows the world's best bounty hunter on a peculiar case.
Further Reading
The Economist article about bounty hunters Michelle Gomez's website Michelle Gomez's Twitter The Remembrance Project website The GAO's 2011 Report on Criminal Alien Statistics
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Transcript
Transcript
#107 The Skip Tracer, Part I
[theme music]
PJ VOGT: From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vogt.
ALEX GOLDMAN: And I'm Alex Goldman.
SRUTHI PINNAMANENI: And--
PJ: And you are Sruthi Pinnamaneni, as far as I know.
SRUTHI: (laughs) Yeah. I'm here with a story. Um so a year ago, I read this article about bounty hunters, and there’s this one line in it that said, "Bounty hunters are now finding almost 90 percent of their fugitives," which I thought sounded like a really high number.
PJ: Yeah.
SRUTHI: In this article, they say, "The success rate has a lot to do with technology for skip tracing, the term of art for locating a man on the lam.”
PJ: A man on the lam.
SRUTHI: A man on the lam. So this is a thing, like there’s this whole group of people. They’re called skip tracers, because the people they’re looking for are called skips.
[MUSIC]
And they’ve apparently gotten so good at tracking people’s digital trails that-- no matter who you are-- if you try to hide, they can find you. So like there's a story that just totally captured my heart, which is this one guy he was trying to find the skip who was known to have a particular, a taste for 7-Eleven Slurpees.
PJ: Uh huh.
SRUTHI: And this guy, he got this database of all the video footage from all the local 7-Elevens. And he ran this, like, facial recognition software--
ALEX: Oh come, on really?
SRUTHI: --and, like, found which 7-Eleven the skip had most recently frequented, and staked it out, and caught the guy coming out with a Slurpee.
ALEX: This sounds very much like an episode of Bones or something.
SRUTHI: (laughs) I--
PJ: An episode of Bones?
ALEX: It sounds so ridiculous.
PJ: I’ve never watched Bones.
ALEX: I've seen every episode.
SRUTHI: So I, of course, wanted to follow one of these skip tracers while they did their job. So I did, and I ended up in this story. It is possibly-- no, it is definitely-- the most challenging, weird story I’ve ever worked on.
PJ: OK.
SRUTHI: And it centers around this one, very tragic thing that happened in 2011. I spoke to a woman who was there that night.
SRUTHI: Um, so just start by telling me actually, your name and, um, who you are.
CHRIS: OK, my name is Chris Storie, and, um, I’m uh, from North Carolina, and, um, my brother’s name was Joe Storie.
So it was early October, and Chris remembers it as this cool fall day...
[MUSIC]
...Which started out really nice. She and her brother Joe, and Joe’s whole family, they were on vacation in this place called Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina.
CHRIS: We had gone out, um, there were several- several of us that went down, the guys went fishing on the head boat and the girls went shopping. So, I don’t like shopping, so I went fishing with the guys.
SRUTHI: Mhmm.
CHRIS: Um, you know just caught some fish, he caught a croaker fish, and of course it was making a croaking noise, (laughs) he put it right in my face actually. And um, and so we just- we really spent some quality time that day.
Later that evening, they all pile into a pickup truck to go to dinner. And at exactly 7:32 p.m., they’re crossing this one intersection when this Chevy Lumina blows a flashing red light, and ends up directly in front of them.
CHRIS: And we actually t-boned him. And they said we hit him and the truck went up in the air and flipped over, uh, I- three times and landed flat on its top. They really don’t know how I made it, because I went through the back window of the truck and landed underneath the truck. Like, they said the only thing sticking out was my feet.
Joe, who was in the front seat, he was killed instantly. The cops tell Chris the guy driving the other car, his name is Luis Rodriguez, he’s an undocumented immigrant from Honduras, and he was driving drunk, so they arrest him.
And then, right away, two pretty crazy things happen.
So, number one, Luis is in the hospital, he was also in-injured in the accident, but the police aren’t watching his room. So he escapes, like just walks right out.
Number two, police catch him and bring him to jail, but then the judge reduces his bail, and he pays like $7,500 and just walks out.
PJ: But he'd already fled once?
SRUTHI: Right. And Chris said she felt as if she would never see him again. And so, the day he posted bail, she made sure that she was there.
CHRIS: I rushed outside of the courtroom doors so that I could meet him, to talk to him.
SRUTHI: Mhmm.
CHRIS: And I did, and I told him, I said, "I want you to know what kind of man you took from my family. He has three sons. I- I can't talk to my brother, I can't pick up a phone and call him,” I said. "Because of you," and he turned around and looked at me and said, "Talk to my attorney."
That's the last time she ever saw him.
PJ: He disappeared again?
SRUTHI: Yeah, he didn’t show up for his next court date, totally vanished. And Chris told me, that this time, the authorities just didn’t seem that interested in finding Luis, and so she actually starts looking for him.
[MUSIC]
Um, she has this mugshot of him. Um, he's this guy in his 40s, light green eyes, buzzcut, has this scar on his temple. And so she takes this, and she starts going to his old neighborhoods, like making friends with the people he used to know. And then she’s driving-
PJ: Is she like explaining why she’s there?
SRUTHI: Yeah. I think a lot of them felt sympathetic towards her, and they’re trying to help her. And then she starts driving to different towns where she’s a heard a rumor that he might be living there now.
CHRIS: We took his picture to convenience stores and said, "Have you seen this man?" And this-this-- several of the store clerks were like, "Yes, I've seen him, he comes in here."
Chris said that it’s been five years of this. Five years of looking for Luis Rodriguez every day, always convinced that she just missed him.
CHRIS: I’ve had--I've lost friends before because they've said, "You know, Chris, you're gonna have to find something that makes you happy, again." But I can't--I can't let it go. Joe was too important. The fact that someone is out there, they killed my brother, knows they devastated a family, and does not even care...Does not even care--that I cannot let go of. And I want him caught.
Last December, Chris finally got some help. In the form of a skip tracer named Michelle Gomez.
[MUSIC]
I talked to bounty hunters who told me, “Michelle is a legend.” Like, this 4’11", Mexican-American woman in this field of big, white dudes. They said she’s found con men that the FBI couldn’t. She’s found stolen yachts, stolen oil tankers, a prized Arabian stallion.
And now she’s going to find Luis Rodriguez, and she’s doing it pro bono.
And so, I flew down to Texas, went to her house in this small town called Lockhart, which is like, 30 minutes south of Austin.
SRUTHI: Hi, Michelle.
MICHELLE: How are you doing?
SRUTHI: Good! It was quite an adventure to get here.
[dogs barking]
Michelle brings me into her house. It’s 8 a.m.
MICHELLE: Girl it was hell sleeping last night. I had to get [indistinct] and put them on my feet.
SRUTHI: Oh, cause you were sick.
MICHELLE: Yeah, and I never get--I never get congested, so I had Nyquil.
She’s eating her breakfast, which is a box of Girl Scout cookies: Samoas. And I ask her, “Were you a Girl Scout?” And she said, “No, but I did have to dress up as one once to take down this drug trafficker.”
[phone rings]
I had a lot of questions. But Michelle’s phone just kept ringing. All these calls about different cases...
MICHELLE: (on the phone) And according to Jimmy’s statement last night… And I usually don’t guarantee everybody, but I find everybody, if you know what I mean.
MALE VOICE: Ah, OK, OK--
Finally, an hour and a half later, she says, “OK. let’s sit down. Let’s find this Luis Rodriguez.”
MICHELLE: Luis Rodriguez. Here’s everything. OK. Let me put this over there
We sit down in front of her old desktop computer.
MICHELLE: Um, where’s my glasses?
Her little dog jumps into her lap.
MICHELLE: OK. Tansy, you need to go over there mama.
So, here’s how Michelle plans to find Luis: He’s undocumented. He’s not going to show up in most official databases. So instead, she’s going to look for someone close to him.
MICHELLE: I want to know who is supporting him. He's hiding behind somebody that- with an established name, or with some kind of establishment period, that has financial means to help him.
SRUTHI: She calls this person “shelter.” Here’s what that means:
Michelle says, “Listen, I’ve found, located tons of people who are undocumented. I live in an area where there’s lots of undocumented people, and I have a few friends who are undocumented. And all of them have the same problem. Like, how do you rent a house or lease a car if you don’t have the right documents.”
And she says, the way they do it is they have a trusted friend, with the right papers, who does it for them.
PJ: That’s their shelter.
SRUTHI: That’s their shelter. So, if she can find Luis’ shelter, she can find Luis. So, she starts with the one clue she has, which is this six-year-old police report.
SRUTHI: What's on the police report?
MICHELLE: The accident date. The parties involved. The vehicles in question.
SRUTHI: Um, she’s scanning through the report and suddenly she says, "Hey! Look at this."
The car that Luis Rodriguez was driving, that Chevy Lumina, is registered to a company. So she's like, "Who runs that company?" She Googles, and she gets this name.
MICHELLE: His name is Thomas [BEEP]. I need to see who [BEEP] is. What, what kind of work he does. Is he able to financially help this guy?
SRUTHI: Just a quick note: we took steps to obscure or change identifying details about certain people in this story.
Okay so, Tomas. She puts him into this database, her go-to spot, it’s called, “Find My Skip.” Um-
PJ: Can anybody be on "Find My Skip" or it is it just--
SRUTHI: No.
PJ: Right.
SRUTHI: She was so secretive about it.
MICHELLE: You're watching, you can't put this on here.
SRUTHI: No.
SRUTHI: It's a lot of sensitive information in there. But the outside of it looks like this...
PJ: Oh it looks!
ALEX: Oh wow. There's like a, there's like a dimly-lit street.
PJ: It's like a very, it's a noir black and white photograph.
ALEX: Yeah, yeah.
SRUTHI: It says, "Get ready. Set. Find."
ALEX: Wow.
SRUTHI: Yeah.
PJ: And so what happens when she gets into it?
MICHELLE: Um, let’s go here. There’s so much information here.
SRUTHI: Mhmm.
SRUTHI: So she puts in Luis’ friend’s name, and immediately, the database just starts spitting out tons of addresses.
MICHELLE: Um, when I see so many addresses like that, it gives me a flag that they've been evicted or they're constantly moving so they can avoid being captured.
Michelle says that shelter should look, on paper, like an upstanding citizen. So, suddenly she’s doubting this friend would be shelter. Also, the friend has all these different social security numbers.
MICHELLE: Another social, another social, with different date of births.
SRUTHI: Oh, these are all different socials, so could they be different people? MICHELLE: No.
SRUTHI: No?
MICHELLE: I know they're not. Because this guy, he's illegal.
SRUTHI: So, Michelle told that the way someone who's undocumented could end up with all these socials is there’s this whole system, like these illegal spots that would be hidden, say, in the back of an electronics store.
MICHELLE: Little hubs, little offices, that they--you can pay anywhere from $500 or $2,000, $3000. And they get all their paperwork. Their socials, their ITIN.
SRUTHI: OK.
MICHELLE: They're all over the place. And they're private. If I were to go one, and I'm like, "Oye," and they're pretty much all Spanish. "I was recommended to come over here?" "Who sent you?" That name better be in the rolodex, because if it's not, they're not going to help me, for nothing.
SRUTHI: So, Michelle moves on from this friend. He may have lent Luis his car, but he’s not the shelter, she thinks. But one of the friend’s known associates catches her eye. This woman.
MICHELLE: So here we have, um, Blanca (beep)
SRUTHI: Mhmm.
[MUSIC]
SRUTHI: She thinks this is the friend's wife. Same last name, lived at the same address.
MICHELLE: So we know they're a match, Bonnie and Clyde.
SRUTHI: Oh!
MICHELLE: See her social?
SRUTHI: Mhmm. So now I have another live social to play with because, usually the woman takes care of--the bills.
SRUTHI: Michelle’s starting to develop a theory. Luis and his friend are both using the friend’s wife as shelter.
But, of course, for this theory to be correct, that wife, Blanca has to look legit. So Michelle goes over to Find My Skip, and looks up Blanca. And immediately she sees, unlike her husband, Blanca has just one social security number. Which is good.
MICHELLE: She's got to stay clean. She cannot be--afford to have any evictions. Because they, they live under her social. That's what I mean, shelter, she's their shelter.
SRUTHI: Very quickly she finds a phone number associated with that address.
MICHELLE: Look at this! So I'm going to call her on my trapline.
SRUTHI: So that means...
MICHELLE: It's another number.
SRUTHI: ...She can't--she can’t see you.
MICHELLE: I'm going to use it--honestly, I'm going to use an Austin number. [phone rings]
MICHELLE: So, she didn’t answer.
SRUTHI: Which I thought was a bad thing. But it wasn’t.
MICHELLE: And that’s ok. But I know it’s a live number.
SRUTHI: Yeah, yeah.
MICHELLE: Um, so what we're going to do is--I need to go to Melissa Data.
SRUTHI: The question Michelle wants to answer now is: Is this still Blanca's number? Like does she still live at this address?
She takes Blanca’s personal information, and just starts plugging into every conceivable local municipal database. Like, the websites that Blanca would use for like, local like, electricity company, the water company. She’s basically pretending to be Blanca, so that one of these websites will, like, just confirm for her, “Yes Blanca’s here and paying her bills.”
MICHELLE: Yes, OK. Oh my god I hate this shit. OK. First name, last name, company name. Here. [Yawns]
[MUSIC]
SRUTHI: So at this point it’s 4 p.m. We’ve been sitting in the front of the computer since the morning. And the next several hours is just watching Michelle try database after database.
MICHELLE: [dog yaps] Tansy, be quiet, Mia.
SRUTHI: I mean just to give you an example, she spends at least 40 minutes at this one deed registration site for, like, Suffolk County, North Carolina, just filling out forms. And then when she hits enter, it takes you back to the homepage.
PJ: (laughs) Oh, god.
ALEX: (Ufff.)
SRUTHI: And my eyes are totally glazed over, but for Michelle, it’s almost like she was in a stakeout. She was a cop, in her car, looking at these websites in a way that she was like “Ok, something’s about to happen right now.”
PJ: What is she eating the whole time?
SRUTHI: She does not eat.
PJ: Is she drinking coffee?
SRUTHI: No. She has her chihuahua on her lap. Her cat was sitting directly in front of the computer screen.
PJ: (laughs)
SRUTHI: Like literally in front.
ALEX: That's cute.
SRUTHI: And she would just work around the cat.
PJ: (laughs)
MICHELLE: Come on, little one
SRUTHI: It’s kind of like having kids who are all over you
MICHELLE: Uh huh. Let’s see. Property tax registry 2. Tax administration, property sales. Um, let’s go here.
[MUSIC]
SRUTHI: It’s 6 p.m., the sun goes down. It’s 7 p.m., it’s 8 p.m. We barely talk. We skip dinner, and then, at 9:05 p.m., she’s on this county website where you pay your property taxes.
MICHELLE: Ok. I’m going to act like I’m paying my bill. Owner 1, owner 2. SRUTHI: Oh here!
MICHELLE: Oh my god!
SRUTHI: And the website spits out these property taxes.
MICHELLE: Wow. Look! (sings) Duh, duh duh duh.
[MUSIC]
She's got two houses in her name. These people, when they come to America, they invest in the land. OK? They invest whatever they get. Look she drives 2 oh 2--oh fuck yeah--2002 Toyota Camry, paid. I gotta print this out.
SRUTHI: Blanca, it turns out, paid the taxes on these two houses and car last month.
PJ: So she's there.
ALEX: So, she's definitely there.
PJ: And not only is she there, either she's like, she's pretty wealthy, or she's shelter. Like a lot...
SRUTHI: Yeah.
PJ: ...She's making a lot of purchases that could be for other people.
SRUTHI: For other people, exactly--so there might be multiple people living in the home with her. And Michelle believes that one of those people could be her subject, Luis Rodriguez
[MUSIC]
She has the skip in her sights.
BREAK
ALEX: Welcome back to the show. Before the break, Michelle felt like she had a very good idea of where Luis was hiding
SRUTHI: So now Michelle needs someone local, like someone in North Carolina, to just gather more information.
[MUSIC]
(on phone)
MICHELLE: Hi Michael, how you doing?
MICHAEL: Alright, what's going on?
She calls a bounty hunter she knows in North Carolina
MICHELLE: Sorry to call you over there, it's 10:30 over there, right?
MICHAEL: Yeah, you're fine.
MICHELLE: Okay, you’re--are you close to
They both pull up Blanca’s address on Google Earth.
MICHELLE: This thing does not give me--
MICHAEL: I'm looking at satellite view.
MICHELLE: Ok, me too.
MICHAEL: Oh shit yeah! This is a trailer park.
MICHELLE: Oh really? That's fucking Honduran country.
MICHAEL: Oh yeah? That's a big damn trailer park too, golly.
And she says, "Hey listen, I need you to go and root through the garbage." Basically she wants to see what mail is coming into that house, like, who is actually living in the house? Because maybe Luis Rodriguez is getting mail.
PJ: Right.
ALEX: Right.
SRUTHI: And, also, she sends him a photo of Luis Rodriguez.
MICHELLE: Yeah and if you see that Honduran there, shit.
She says, “When you see him, don’t do anything, I want to be the one who catches him.” And right away, she’s like planning her trip to North Carolina. She says it’s going to take a couple of weeks.
PJ: So like, at that point does she call the family and say like, "I think I've got your guy."
SRUTHI: No. Michelle has actually never spoken to Chris Storie or anyone in Joe's family. She’s never met them, doesn’t know them.
ALEX: But aren’t they the people that hired her?
SRUTHI: No. Michelle, at first, she hadn’t wanted to tell me who her client was, she said she had to get that person’s permission. It turns out that she was hired by this group called The Remembrance Project. And The Remembrance Project, it’s run by a woman named Maria Espinoza. You probably haven’t heard of her, but--
ALEX: I have not.
SRUTHI: You know, I think she actually prefers it that way. Like she doesn’t talk about herself much. But, I think you’ve seen her at least once.
[MUSIC]
Do you remember just a few days after Trump took office, he signed that big executive order. It’s the one where he’s saying he’s going to build a wall.
[Video of President Trump's executive order]
The dark haired woman standing right behind while he’s signing, that’s Maria Espinoza. There’s actually this video of her, let me just pull it up. It’s her giving congressional testimony earlier this year.
MARIA ESPINOZA: My name is Maria Espinoza, my testimony is based upon my nearly 8 years of traveling across the country with the Remembrance Project, an organization that advocates for those families whose loved ones are killed by illegal aliens.
SRUTHI: You see her, and she’s in this crisp blue blazer, and she’s neatly laying out this picture of America that she has seen in her travels. One that is violent and unsafe.
MARIA: Based upon preliminary information, we believe that the American stolen lives may number in the tens of thousands.
Five years after Chris Storie’s brother died, she got a call from Maria, who she didn’t know. And, Maria says, “Hey listen, will you come and tell your story at this big event that I’m organizing?”
CHRIS: And I tell you what, at first, I told her no, I didn’t want to go.
SRUTHI: And why did you say no?
CHRIS: Because I get--you know, when I talk about it a lot, it does upset me, and it does--I think with the PTSD, it kinda sends me back in a tailspin kinda. But I did, I went and I’ll tell you what, that’s one of the best things I have ever done.
SRUTHI: Chris ends up flying to Houston to be a part of Maria’s, she calls it the “stolen lives quilt.” It’s not actually a quilt, it’s a line of family members who stand behind her while she’s giving a speech, and they’re holding up pictures of the people they’ve lost. When Chris arrived, she said that Maria was so welcoming.
CHRIS: She had never met me, but it’s like--I mean, they knew about my family, they knew my brother’s name, it’s not like they got mixed up about which family member you were, or, you know? You know, it’s just like you were special. SRUTHI: And it felt sincere?
CHRIS: Oh yes. Yes, definitely.
SRUTHI: I wanted to understand Maria’s interest in Chris and in Luis Rodriguez. I asked her to do an interview, at first she was hesitant, but there were negotiations, finally she agreed. So this past March we talked at her house in DC, her husband Tim was there too. The two of them, they started The Remembrance Project together, and they told me that before that, they used to spend their time fundraising for childhood diseases. Like they were not particularly politically active
MARIA: In fact, we hadn't attended a town hall, I think, until after we got involved, so we were not---
TIM: Political.
MARIA: So we weren't political.
TIM: What we were doing is just kind of living our lives. You know Maria was helping kids who have cancer. She was helping kids with spina bifida. I was--I was designing roads, bridges in Texas. And so at the time before we kind of were awakened by this news that we saw, we were like most people, who were thinking our representatives were taking care of business for us.
The news that Tim’s referring to just then, it’s actually one specific news story from September of 2006.
NEWS CLIP: Officer Rodney Johnson will be buried on Wednesday, he was murdered, allegedly by this man, Juan Leonardo Quintero.
It was the second time within a year that an undocumented immigrant had shot a cop in Texas. And Tim and Maria said they were wondering if there was some kind of pattern.
MARIA: I called around the police department and tried to find information out; they wouldn’t give me information.
TIM: So then I noticed that if I would just Google “child killed by immigrant” — and story after story after story. And so I started documenting that on a spreadsheet.
These sorts of stories — they’re the kind you find on Breitbart now. But not back then. Back then, many mainstream Republicans were pro-immigration, they didn’t want to risk the Hispanic vote and these victims were evidence in an argument that basically nobody wanted to make.
And so, Tim and Maria, when they start calling the people on the spreadsheet, they find themselves on the phone with people who maybe hadn’t even shared their stories before. Next thing they knew, according to Maria, she’s meeting them for coffee, even going along with some of them to murder trials. And she says it just became her life.
SRUTHI: I'm just curious like, there's a world in which you could've said, "You know what, we're gonna just keep working with fundraising, with these kids that have this terrible disease. Why not focus on them? Why this?
MARIA: Well, I think one point: this issue is forever, it’s permanent. And it’s just ... make me cry. (light sobs)
SRUTHI: It’s ok to cry.
MARIA: No. (clears throat)
SRUTHI: We can wait a moment.
MARIA: Thanks, honey. I think that--
SRUTHI: Is it a particular story, Maria, that you think of when you get emotional? MARIA: All of them I guess, it is huge--because we know so many of the families. SRUTHI: Yeah.
MARIA: And it’s not something I wanted to do. However, if they’re suffering through it, why can’t we just go and listen, we’re not even, you know, directly affected. Um … and, you know, some of these cases, you know, a 14-year-old girl just shot in the back five yards from her safety, from her home, from her gate. And then a mother of five, stabbed in the heart with a three-inch knife over wanting to hijack her.
SRUTHI: Can I, can I--when people talk about crime within the immigrant population, like legal or illegal, they say, statistically on the whole, there's far less crime in these communities and therefore like particular anecdotes, it doesn't speak to a larger group.
MARIA: Well, two things. What the report has done is mixed immigrant crime and illegal alien crime.
What Maria’s referring to there is this big government report that came out in 2011.
MARIA: And that’s absolutely wrong. False. No. So, we’re concerned about illegal aliens who commit crime, and with someone like Chris Storie’s case, that takes place more often than you’d think.
So this question of how often. Like, how many times last year did undocumented immigrants commit crimes? This turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. Like, we’re not even sure exactly how many undocumented immigrant are even in the US. I talked to several people, academics, statisticians, think tanks like across the political spectrum, and none of them could agree on a number. They did agree that Maria’s numbers-- tens of thousands of criminals-- are just way too high.
But the thing that Maria has discovered is that you don’t even have to worry about the numbers when you have these horrifying stories. They’re powerful. They become a weapon in the right hands.
(APPLAUSE)
And in 2015, Tim and Maria finally met someone who wanted to use it.
[MUSIC]
TRUMP PHOENIX RALLY: I have met with many of the great parents who lost their children to sanctuary cities and open borders. So many people, so many many people. So sad. They will be joining me on the stage in a little while …
Three weeks after Trump announced his candidacy, he and Maria and the families, they met in private. And then he is giving all of these speeches with the backdrop of Remembrance Project families like standing behind him.
At this other event in Houston, he’s talking about the criminals sneaking across the border, and killing people, and at one point, he actually turns around and looks straight at the families -- including, like Chris Storie was there -- and he makes them this promise.
DONALD TRUMP: The many individuals who have committed crimes, but escaped justice, fled the jurisdiction, or were otherwise never caught--and many of the folks are in that position, where you even sometimes know where they are, and they’re never caught. We're going to catch them. We're going to catch them.
[MUSIC]
SRUTHI: In the weeks after Trump won the election, Maria and Tim decided that the time was right to try something new. They would find one of these guys, like one of these immigrants who’d committed a crime, and gotten away.
They pick their first case: Luis Rodriguez, the man who five years ago fled after being arrested for killing Chris Storie’s brother.
Tim and Maria wanted to help Chris find justice, sure. But Luis has a value beyond that; as a poster child in the larger war they’re waging.
So now, the best skip tracer in the world, Michelle Gomez is hunting Luis Rodriguez. It's no longer just one gig for a bounty hunter or a family seeking closure, it's part of something bigger now.
In Part II, Michelle goes to North Carolina to complete her mission.
DALLAS: There’s the mom and the other one.
MICHELLE: That’s her, that’s the daughter Blanca’s daughter
DALLAS: There’s the dog, he’s no problem.
Credits
Reply All is hosted by PJ Vogt and me, Alex Goldman. The show is produced by Sruthi Pinnamaneni, Phia Bennin, Damiano Marchetti and Austin Mitchell. Additional production help by Jon Hanrahan. Our editor is Tim Howard, our intern is Anna Foley, fact checking by Michelle Harris. We were mixed by Rick Kwan and Kate Bilinski.
Extra special thanks this week to Hans Linnartz, "Scott" MacLean III, Alfonso Aguilar, Walter Ewing, Alex Nowrasteh, Susan Long, Michelle Mittelstadt, Don Rosenberg, Frank Bean, Charis Kubrin, Steven Camarota, Joslyn Johnson, Nelson Votaw, Ryan Pfeifle, Nick Kulish, Chloe Prasinos, and Emily Kennedy.
Matt Lieber is when you are just sitting on the couch flipping through the channels and you find a movie you haven’t seen in a long time and you just sit there and watch the whole thing. Our theme song is by the Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder and our ad music is by Build Buildings. Our website is replyall.ninja. You can listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.