Background
In the early hours of May 1, 2020, Anthony McNeil was shot and killed during a parking-lot altercation in Columbia, Maryland. Investigators eventually linked Jerome Thomas — known by the nickname “Hammer” — to the shooting through witness interviews, and a photo-array identification on May 14, 2020 prompted police to obtain a felony arrest warrant charging him with first-degree murder.
By the time Howard County police traveled to North Carolina to apprehend Thomas, he had already fled a local motel. Working from a cell phone number provided by Thomas’s mother, detectives sought an “Emergency Situation Disclosure” from Verizon at 3:41 a.m. on May 15, 2020 — without a warrant — obtaining real-time cell-site location information (CSLI) that traced his phone to Annapolis, Maryland. Officers then deployed a Stingray cell-site simulator to pinpoint the phone to a specific motel room, where Thomas was arrested later that afternoon. A subsequent warrant-backed search of his phone revealed a text exchange in which his mother wrote, in part, “nobody told you to kill that boy.”
Thomas moved to suppress all phone evidence, arguing the warrantless CSLI request and cell-site simulator use violated the Fourth Amendment. The circuit court denied suppression on exigent-circumstances grounds. At trial, the court also admitted the mother’s text message as an adoptive admission and gave a transferred-intent instruction. The jury convicted Thomas of first-degree murder, second-degree murder, first-degree assault, and related firearm offenses; he was sentenced to life without parole plus a consecutive ten-year firearm term.
The Court’s Holding
The Appellate Court of Maryland affirmed on all three issues. On the suppression question, the court assumed without deciding that real-time CSLI obtained from a service provider constitutes a Fourth Amendment search — an issue neither the Supreme Court in Carpenter v. United States (2018) nor Maryland courts had squarely resolved. It held, consistent with State v. Andrews (2016), that use of a cell-site simulator does constitute a search. Regardless, the court found both warrantless actions justified under the exigent-circumstances exception: Thomas was a murder suspect armed with a firearm who had already evaded arrest across two states, conventional investigative avenues had been exhausted, and the public-danger rationale supported immediate action without pausing to secure additional court orders.
On the adoptive-admission question, the court upheld admission of the mother’s accusatory text. Although Thomas never directly responded to the line “nobody told you to kill that boy,” he replied to adjacent portions of the same message just two minutes later. A jury could reasonably infer he read the entire message, that a reasonable person in his position would have denied the accusation if it were untrue, and that his silence as to that portion amounted to an adoptive admission under Maryland Rule 5-803(a).
Finally, the court upheld the transferred-intent jury instruction. Evidence that Thomas had been fighting another person in the group moments before the fatal shot, in a dark parking lot, was sufficient to generate the instruction — permitting the jury to consider whether Thomas meant to shoot someone else and mistakenly shot the victim.
Key Takeaways
- Warrantless real-time CSLI from a service provider remains a constitutionally open question in Maryland, but the exigent-circumstances exception can validate such access when a murder suspect is actively fleeing and other investigative avenues are exhausted.
- A cell-site simulator deployed without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment search, but it too may be excused by exigent circumstances where the suspect poses an ongoing public danger.
- A defendant’s selective response to a multi-part text message — answering one portion while ignoring an accusatory statement — can satisfy the hearing-and-understanding prong of the tacit-admission test, making the unanswered accusation admissible as an adoptive admission.
- A transferred-intent instruction requires only “some evidence” to support it; circumstantial evidence of a nighttime brawl and misidentification of the target is sufficient.
Why It Matters
Thomas is a significant data-point in the still-developing body of law on warrantless real-time cell tracking after Carpenter. While the court declined to resolve whether real-time CSLI from a carrier categorically requires a warrant, its detailed exigency analysis provides a roadmap for when law enforcement can act without one — and courts and practitioners will look to this fact-intensive balancing when evaluating future emergency-disclosure requests.
The adoptive-admission holding also has practical significance in an era of pervasive digital communication. It clarifies that partial engagement with a text thread does not insulate a defendant from the inference that he read — and silently accepted — every part of the message, expanding the reach of the tacit-admission doctrine into electronic conversations.