Lochlan Nicol of Jensen Beach, Fla., was riding his bike when he was struck by an S.U.V. His AirPod landed inside the vehicle, allowing investigators to track down the driver.
Lochlan Nicol, 15, of Jensen Beach, Fla., was biking to a gas station and convenience store near his home to buy ice cream last week when a driver heading in the opposite direction suddenly turned into the station and hit him, he said.
It was about 10:30 p.m. on May 22, and Lochlan was hit so hard that his head crashed through the rear passenger-side window, breaking his nose, cheekbone and eye socket, and knocking him unconscious.
The driver pulled Lochlan out of the road, left him outside the gas station and then drove away, according to Sheriff William D. Snyder of Martin County.
What the driver didn’t know was that he had driven away with a tracking device — the AirPod that Lochlan had been wearing, which had been knocked out of his ear and had lodged under a floor mat inside the car, Sheriff Snyder said.
Using the AirPod’s location-tracking feature, the Martin County Sheriff’s Office said on Friday that Peter Bradford Swing, 49, of Jensen Beach had been arrested and charged with failing to stop at the scene of a crash with great bodily injury, a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
“It was that earbud that provided geo-tracking right to the suspect’s Jensen Beach home,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement. Deputies found the silver Hyundai Santa Fe involved in the crash behind Mr. Swing’s house, with a broken rear passenger-side window, the sheriff’s office said.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
