ALC-Game & Fish/State Police

August 14, 2025 ·3:00 PM ·Room A, MAC ·1:04:13

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Representative Johnny Rye Unverified 43:04

you had to to pause on some of the information that was put out because again everything started with those two little girls that had just witnessed something that it's hard to even you know process what those girls had witnessed so when you are working off a description of a suspect knowing that that person has been those you know juveniles have been traumatized so much there's a lot of collaboration that has to go into that not that you don't trust them but we know from law enforcement from years of doing this job that eyewitnessed accounts are sometimes flawed so especially when somebody witnesses a traumatic event that it it skews their memory and so when the information on the suspect was developed from these girls there was quite a time lapse to be able to corroborate that with other witnesses that saw people or saw the person that matched the description that these girls gave us and then by the time that you take that and you start to corroborate that information and then that leads to the car being identified from a person that saw the suspect that was identified by the or I'm sorry that was described by the little girls and then that information you start working off that and you know to the technology that was used we live in a day of ring cameras and surveillance cameras and security cameras that are stationed throughout and they were able to go back and look at every possible route in and out of that park and capture data that was that captured that potential suspect vehicle and then we were able to narrow that down to the one particular car that we felt like was our car of interest and there are some technology things that I probably won't get into today that are available that helped us identify that car isolate that specific car and once it was identified and that led you know of course to the the arrest itself one thing that you know would like to touch on we met every day at the end of the day we would have a conference call with the investigators and we talked about the need for the public and I believe in that and I believe that we owe it to the public to try to put as much information out as possible but you're always hesitant in a situation like this because if we put out what we think and what we suspect but it's not actually the case and I'll give you an example we knew that this suspect was injured we knew that there was blood loss on scene we suspected that we knew if it was consistent with the tax like that and other crime scenes that and other crimes that you know have been investigated we suspected we knew the types of injuries our concern about that was number one we didn't put that out to the public immediately because the first thing that those investigators did was went to every emergency room and urgent health care center in a tristate area just anywhere that was within basically driving distance of that area and notified them that if anyone comes into that treatment facility seeking medical treatment with wounds consistent that we were looking for that we needed to be notified Wellf if we put that information out to the media then obviously we're going to push that guy away from medical treatment and because he he knows that we're looking for that he knows that we that he's injured or that we know that he's injured so there's a time lapse before we can push that information out and once that time did lapse, then we did go ahead and release the information that we felt like he was injured having said that we didn't know what those injuries were we knew that there was a violent struggle out there and we didn't know if he was injured to his hands to his arms if he had head injuries we knew that there was blood loss but we didn't know for sure so you're inclined to put out to the public that you know we're looking for a person that matches this description that may have these types of wounds but what if we get that wrong and we're working off percentages that we feel like that there's a good chance that that ' s the type of wounds that this person has but it turns out that wasn't the case and and now there's a suspect that someone may think that hey we need to take a look at this guy. I think that you know it's it's someone that you'd be interested in but you know he doesn't have cuts to his hands or his arms or you know some of the things that we are kind of speculating about at that point because it's not confirmed so we have to be very careful about unintentionally putting a red herring out there that now we have people not calling in and giving us information that we need because it doesn't fit certain things that we think it should fit and you know so that's always a concern there's I can tell you that every day when we met with the investigators in our communications team it was specifically with the intent of giving the public as much information as we could possibly give them without giving them something that was going to be detrimental to the case in addition to identifying and arresting this subject we also have to prosecute him successfully and so even as we sit here today there's a little bit of you know concern about at some point a jury's going to be seated and you know we can't give a lot of information that might be considered inflammatory because we don't want to prejudice that jury you know we don't want to give a defense the opportunity to claim that we've prejudiced that jury so it's I can tell you that there was a lot of discussion about having a press conference immediately and addressing the media and but one of the things that's a pet peeve of mine is for someone to call a press conference only stand there and say I don't know I don't know or I won't say that's extremely frustrating and so we didn't want to do that so we put out as much information as we could as quickly as we could but all the while it was it had to be calculated on is this gonna hinder the investigation is this going to help us and a lot of the information that we put out did result in tips and things like that that we we were able to work off of that helped tremendously into another question that you asked as far as like the tip lines and things like that Honestly we were overwhelmed with people that are very well intentioned that are calling and they're trying to give information that they think we need to know and until you triage that information and you realize that it's either beneficial or it's not there's some that you can you know kind of write off pretty quick and there's some that you can't but if you receive500 plus tips that's500 you know different directions now we're sending our investigators so it's just a it's a very lengthy process which you can quickly get outside of your bandwidth on your capability in this particular case we had no reason to believe on the front end that there was any connection between our victim and our suspects but we didn't know that and it's something that you have to you know look into and close that loophole so you immediately start doing almost a background of your victims and and trying to find if there's any type of adversarial relationships that they have in this situation our victims were fromor they had moved to Montana then to South Dakota then most recently at Arkansas and so there was a huge geographical area that we had to cover to talk to neighbors talk to work associates talk to family members anything and everything that you could think of you know trying to establish if there was some type of relationship that we need to look at if there was a a possible you know motive behind this and you know everything that every lead that you're having to either close the loophole on or follow up on it's it's spreading those resources out pretty quick. So we did rely on other state city and federal agencies to assist with that we have federal partners that were able to assist us with some technology that is that proved to be very very beneficial so it was absolutely a coordinated effort and one thing that we're blessed in Arkansas and captain Tono's unfortunately this is not always the case but just tell it like it is law enforcement tends to be very territorial sometimes and they're very hesitant to reach out for help and in Arkansas we are so blessed that we don't deal with that I got calls immediately from sheriffs police chiefs special agents in charge of FBIhSI you name it you know whatever the federal acronym is they were calling saying what do you need how can we help you and so it's nice to not only know that they're there if we reach out to them but they were reaching out to us and it was the same with all of our local partners there even the partners inor and those other states that I mentioned so it it quickly can overwhelm resources so you have to rely on those relationships and we're very blessed in Arkansas that we've got a really good relationship with our local and federal partners and it made all the difference in this case and it's the reason that an arrest was made as fast as it was. Thank you.