Carla Melendez started to feel worried one night when her husband didn’t come home.
In order to find her husband’s whereabouts, Melendez said she started to use the “Find My iPhone” app, which sent out a pulsing dot that seemed confusing.
“[The app] showed trees and it was weird, because why would his phone be by trees? And it was there for a while,” said Melendez.
Melendez decided to investigate by driving to the area as indicated by the app’s signals. After driving for half an hour, she found her husband lying dead on the Turkey Drive off Aldine Westfield Road where there were some trees on the side. He suffered from a gunshot aimed at the torso that caused his death.
“If somebody saw something please say something,” said Melendez. “He didn’t deserve to be thrown like this, like a dog in the street.”
Investigators are not sure how long the victim had been lying dead on the side of the road. They tracked down the victim’s friends and learned that he was shot by accident.
A man identified as Tristain J. Porter was reportedly arrested and had been charged with the murder of 23-year-old Ramiro Acosta, Melendez’s husband.
In an interview with the police, Porter said he and Acosta were planning to rob a drug dealer. However, they got themselves caught in a scuffle which ended up with Porter accidentally shooting his friend.
According to Melendez, her husband used to be a gang member and that he might still have enemies even after he had changed his ways.
It was unclear who dumped Acosta’s dead body on the road.
Melendez is not the first one to use the Find My iPhone app in doing detective work, as others have relied on the app’s features, such as the kill switch mechanism, to successfully recover their iPhones.
