Google Camera Captures Man Pointing Gun From What Looks Like House Where Infant Found Dead
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JOHANNES EISELE/AFP/Getty Images(DETROIT) — Google’s effort to revamp its mapping system took an eerie turn when one of its Google Street View camera trucks captured a young shirtless man pointing a gun at a Detroit street.
In September 2009, Google’s camera snapped photos of a man with a gun standing on the porch of the house that appears to be the house where a 17-month-old child was found dead in a closet under a pile of clothes this summer.
There are four other people standing behind the man with the gun, all gazing toward the camera, which was lodged atop a Google Street View mapping car.
All parties on the porch look young, perhaps in their teens. The series of photos shows how they all turn to look at the Google truck as it passed by.
A meteorologist from Maryland, Jacob Wykoff, who stumbled upon the photo on Reddit, told ABC News that he found it frightening.
“Anytime you see a gun pointed at a cameraman it gets kind of scary,” he said. “Detroit kind of has a reputation nowadays for doing that kind of stuff. It wasn’t that out of the ordinary.”
Ordinary or not, the death of the 17-month-old child at what looks like the same house in the Google Street View photo still strikes a chord in the Detroit population. According to police, it hasn’t been determined exactly how the infant died, and no one has been charged in her death.
People have been speaking up on the DetroitYes forum, saying this is the house where Zyia Turner, the young child, died last June.
One person commenting had compared each house on the block with that in the Google image and found that the photo and the alleged crime scene matched.
“Noticed some similarities. Same cream-colored brick, same tapered shape to the brick columns, same green Astroturf glued to the porch, same wrought-iron security door, same gutter security camera and the same neighbor’s fence.”
Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy told CBS Detroit, though, that this photo left many unanswered questions and offered no evidence that a crime had been committed in this house.
“Was it this person’s home? Because you do have a right to bear arms in your home,” Worthy told CBS Detroit. “Certainly, it looks like he’s on a porch that’s attached to a home, so that would not be a legal issue.”
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