A Welsh teenager accused of burglarizing a house was nabbed by police after a witness identified his Facebook profile picture.
Joshua Roberts stole from a house in the northern city of Wrexham in what police described as a “quick in, out, and gone” incident. A neighbor saw Roberts fleeing the scene and logged into Facebook to confirm her suspicions that the robber was who she thought he was.
The witness showed Roberts’s Facebook profile picture to an officer, who recognized the suspect and arrested him. Forensic evidence matched the teen’s footwear to scuff marks in the house.
It’s just another incident where Facebook played an an integral part in identifying suspects.
Roberts allegedly committed the crime while on early release from a previous sentence. In November 2012, he and an accomplice broke into a house and stole a computer worth $1,000, which has not been recovered. His three-year youth-custody sentence was reduced to two and a half years for a guilty plea.
In this occurrence, Roberts stole a computer again, but did not fully ransack or vandalize the house. Paul Abraham, who’s defending the teen, said the 19-year-old had fallen in with poor company.
“He knows that he needs to behave in future, or he faces the prospect of increasingly longer and longer sentences,” said Abraham.
Photo via weninggestari/Hashgram