A detective in San Diego arrived back at the office after leaving the scene of a homicide. The body, which had been discovered in a remote area by a utility crew, had multiple gunshot wounds. Although a canvas of the crime scene yielded no useful information, a recently issued California state identification card was found on the male victim. With just this information, the detective used his desktop computer to log into the Law Enforcement National Data Exchange (N-DEx) via his secure Internet link to the Law Enforcement Online system and conducted a search of the victim’s name. Quickly he discovered several incident reports involving the man from the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office in West Virginia. Through the narratives, the detective learned that the victim had previous narcotics-related arrests and convictions. One report documented a call for service for a disturbance at the victim’s parents’ residence; that report provided a name for the victim’s next of kin. The detective called the Harrison County investigator listed on the incident report and asked him to perform a death notification and to ask the family for any information they had about the victim’s activities in California.

A short time later, the Harrison County investigator contacted the detective with information from his interview. According to the family, the victim left West Virginia for California a few weeks earlier with a traveling companion he had known from jail. Through an N-DEx query of the companion’s name, the San Diego detective found correlations between the two men and also learned that the dead man’s companion was a parolee from Texas. A return from the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) that accompanied the N-DEx search indicated that a parole violation warrant was issued for the companion’s arrest at about the same time the man was known to have left West Virginia for California.