Why would fingerprints of a 17-year-old
illegal alien, which had been taken by the INS and entered into a national database, be locked away in the files of the Washington State juvenile justice system and unavailable to local or state police? Malvo had only been charged, not convicted. That boggles my mind. (see article below)
Excerpt:
AFTER THOUSANDS OF CALLS, 3 CRACK THE CASE
Buffalo News/Washington Post October 25, 2002
LINK "Police thought the motive for the crime was robbery but weren't sure, and had run out of leads. They had some physical evidence that tantalized the investigators from Washington:
a fingerprint, lifted from a magazine about guns and ammunition that had been dropped at the scene. FBI agents flew to Alabama on Monday to examine the evidence. . . .
Investigators ran the fingerprint through some national databases . . .
The
INS charged Malvo and his mother with illegally entering the country and
took their fingerprints, . . ."
I was posting from memory and do not recall which article I saw it in. But your article confirms the fact that local Alabama Police had a fingerprint and could not identify it.
From other articles, it seems that the fingerprint dated from September 21.
Only when the Feds got involved, could the fingerprint be identified on Monday, October 21.
As I recall, the article stated that the Feds used a database "not available to local police". As I recall, the juvenile status also had something to do with it.