Interesting criminal records research today. A customer called us after running a nationwide criminal search through our Premium service. She wanted to know why her ex-husband Richie’s (not his real name) multiple convictions did not appear.
We asked her for the regions where she expected to find records. They included San Diego, CA, and Miami, FL.
First we checked the San Diego County Superior Court online database. Our Premium database also includes this resource, but it helps to double-check directly at the source. This is one reason our website is so helpful for criminal records research. Both free and fee-based databases are available from the same interface.
No records appeared for San Diego County.
Next we checked for Miami-Dade County, Florida criminal records and infractions using this database. Two cases appeared. Unfortunately the date of birth listed in the Miami records did not match the DOB that our customer ran in her search. And though the name and middle initial matched the record, we still didn’t know if these records were for the correct person.
We then took a look at federal district court records nationwide through the PACER service. This proved to be the lynchpin in solving the matter. We located a filing in San Diego County relating to an immigration board appeal case. It wasn’t a criminal case, but it did list one party as Richie. And the clincher? The exact name matched the records we found in Miami-Dade County and our customer’s name appeared on one of the docket entries, as the (then) wife of the subject. So even though the birth date for the Miami record was different than what we’d been given, we knew it was the right person. What’s likely is that this person either lied to his wife about his true birth date or lied to the police.
We ran another nationwide search using our own Premium database, but this time we input a partial first name as a non-exact name search (e.g., entering “RIC will give you results for Rick, Ricky, Richie, Richard, etc.). We also input the new birth year we’d found. We received 15 records, all from Miami-Dade County, showing a long criminal history of drug sales, resisting arrest, felony weapons use, and other charges. The new date of birth we found linked the name to additional AKA’s, each with alternate birth dates, and each with convictions.
It seems this person is something of a chameleon, which explains why our customer was not able to get the full picture by doing a Premium search on his exact name and (incorrect) date of birth. By using both the Premium and the free databases, we got to the bottom of the matter.