FAUQUIER COUNTY (WSLS 10) - Police said a crucial piece of technology they use every day helped them identify a suspect on the loose after the shooting deaths of two journalists and injury of the woman they were interviewing.
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Officers use license plates readers, camera-like devices used to scan identifying information on vehicles and alert an officer if those vehicles are related to an investigation. Police said the readers are incredible tools helping them catch criminals. That's exactly what happened Wednesday, as soon as state police entered Vester Flanagan's information into their database.
The licensee plate reader perched on the back of State Trooper Pam Neff's patrol car spotted Flanagan's vehicle on the interstate.
"As soon as it was entered in, it did come up with a positive hit that that vehicle just passed me less than three minutes earlier," Trooper Neff explained.
Day or night, technology like license plate readers can mean the difference between catching the suspect or losing track of them.
"It's got two different cameras on it. It's got a black-and-white one, which is a nighttime camera and it's also got a color picture and it takes a picture of every single license plate that comes through and it reads it," Trooper Naff explained.
State police said they have 44 LPRs, one of which helped track down Flanagan more than 200 miles from where police said he killed two people.
LPRs are not state specific, so once officers get a hit on a plate, they have to get to it to make sure it's the the vehicle they're actually looking for.
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