Joselyn Martinez was just 9 years old when her father was gunned down outside their family's restaurant. Twenty-seven years later, she was able to use some Internet sleuthing to track down the man accused of killing her dad.
The accused gunman, Justo Santos, who was a teenager at the time of the shooting, fled to the Dominican Republic, was briefly jailed there and then let go. The NYPD ended its investigation after he was released from Dominican jail.
But Martinez never stopped wondering about Santos' whereabouts, and recently tracked him down online from her home in the Bronx.
"The idea of being able to look up a person with Facebook and Myspace -- Myspace way back when it started -- that kind of gave me an idea like, 'Well, I can actually look up someone with this background check stuff,'" said Martinez, who discovered that Santos was living in Miami.
She gave the information to detectives from the 34th Precinct in the Bronx, and on Monday Santos faced a judge in Miami.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly applauded Martinez's work and said it was a mistake for the department to have closed the case.
"In fact he was arrested, however, he was only in jail for a little over a year and he was released and they should not have closed the case," said Kelly. "It should've been looked at to see if there was additional information."
