GPS monitoring company lost track of teen, DA says

Tye Toliver, mother of three-year-old Devin Page, Jr., center, describes her son during a celebration of life and balloon release in his honor at Morning Star Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, La., on Saturday, April 16, 2022. Page was killed by a stray bullet while sleeping in his family’s home on Tuesday.

A teen implicated in a shooting that left a 3-year-old dead last April was required to be wearing an ankle monitor from a previous murder arrest at the time of the killing — but had flagrantly and repeatedly violated the terms of his supervision without the company responsible for the monitor reporting it, prosecutors say.

The district attorney's office filed a motion Friday asking a judge to place the juvenile under another company's supervision. In the document, prosecutors describe multiple oversight failures, including one time when the teen was sent to a juvenile detention facility wearing the monitor and left without it, unbeknownst to the monitoring company, which wasn't aware of the situation until prosecutors informed it.

Struck by a stray bullet as he lay asleep inside his family's Fairfields Avenue home last April, 3-year-old Devin Page's killing led to widespread outcry as the boy's family called on local leaders to step up anti-violence efforts amid surging bloodshed.

According to the district attorney's motion, investigators found shell casings from three different weapons at the crime scene. About two months after the shooting, in June 2022, police arrested three people on firearm counts in an unrelated incident and confiscated a gun with an "auto sear," a modification that significantly increases a weapon's rate of fire.

Months after the gun arrest, forensic testing linked the firearm to one of the three guns connected with Page's death, the DA's motion says, although investigators don't believe it's the one used to fire the fatal shots.

Prosecutors then learned that one of the people arrested with the gun, Johnny Brown, was out on bail at the time after being indicted by a grand jury for second-degree murder in a different case, the motion says.

A judge had ordered Brown to wear an ankle monitor. So detectives investigating Page's killing began seeking information from Criminal Tracking Services, LLC, the company tasked with overseeing that monitoring.

Representatives for CTS did not return a request for comment.

In 2021, after Brown was released on bail in his second-degree murder charge, CTS regularly gave the court positive updates on his behavior, the motion says. Frederick Hall, a company representative, said in one report that Brown had enrolled at Second Chance Academy High School in Baton Rouge.

Following Brown's rearrest in June 2022 on gun counts, however, Hall appeared before the court to provide what prosecutors describe as CTS' "first documented unfavorable report" on Brown, during which Hall told the court that Brown failed to keep his ankle monitor charged and that he had violated curfew the night before.

In subsequent updates, the motion continues, Hall continued to inform the court of Brown's noncompliance, noting that he had to be "constantly reminded" to charge his ankle monitor. It's unclear whether the judge took any action in response to Hall's reports.

During the last update the document mentions, a different CTS representative, Gloria Hall, told the court on Feb. 15 that Brown had "absconded supervision." At that point, the motion notes that Brown had already been "rearrested again and placed in juvenile detention" six days earlier.

Months later, when forensic testing linked the gun Brown was found with to the scene where Devin Page was killed, prosecutors began to scrutinize Brown's monitoring records and found long periods for which the company had no documentation of tracking him, even as Hall continued to update the courts on Brown's compliance, the motion says.

CTS told the court it was monitoring Brown from August 2021 through February 2023. But records by a separate company that assists CTS with tracking contained records only from June to November 2022, the motion says.

When the discrepancy was brought to Hall's attention, he told prosecutors he would need to request the missing records from a third company. On June 15, the document says that Hall provided "what he represented to be the rest of Brown's location records" — however, there were multiple days or weeks-long gaps for which no location information was available, the motion says.

In particular, prosecutors noted that there were no records for April 13, the day Page was killed.

In copies of an email exchange between Hall and District Attorney Hillar Moore included in the document, Hall tells Moore that he filed reports "each time [Brown] didn't charge [his monitor] for a day."

However, Moore says in the motion that Brown "was not even wearing a monitor" after he was released from a juvenile facility in February — until Hall put it back on him in June, when Moore brought the matter to Hall's attention.

"Unbeknownst to Hall, Brown's ankle monitor was still located at the juvenile detention facility on June 23, 2023 when the state reached out to the Director of Juvenile Services ... to attempt to locate the monitor," the motion says, adding that there were no records to indicate "that CTS or anyone on its behalf actually monitored Brown" after Nov. 21, 2022.

The document does not explain why Brown was released from custody despite his previous murder arrest.

"The court minutes in this case reflect that a representative of CTS appeared in court on Feb. 15 to report that Brown had absconded," the document continues. "If CTS had actually been monitoring Brown, would they have tracked him to detention?"

Though court-ordered GPS monitoring has grown in popularity in recent years amid shifting views about mass incarceration and its costs to taxpayers, until recently, Louisiana had virtually no standards or oversight when it came to governing electronic monitoring providers.

Following a spate of high-profile violent incidents, including one in which a man who was ordered to undergo GPS tracking through a phone app successfully evaded police for more than a week by turning off his phone after he shot a woman in front of her young son, the state passed a bill cracking down on offenders found tampering with their devices, as well as those tasked with monitoring them.

By Dec. 1, 2024, service providers will be required to register with the State's Department of Public Safety and Corrections and must alert municipal authorities within minutes if they find someone has tampered with their device or violated any boundaries set upon their release. Providers will also be required to give law enforcement specific information about an individual the day after the person is placed under monitoring.

Offenders found to have tampered with their devices face fines of up to $500 and six months in jail. Those accused of a felony face even harsher penalties: Up to $1,000 in fines and a year of imprisonment.

Email Elyse Carmosino at [email protected].