Off the Cuff

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Shaun Welcome to another episode of Off the cuff conversations with Shaun and John about Vegas news, case updates, technology, and whatever else we feel like talking about. I'm your host, Shaun

John And I'm your co-host, John.

Shaun It's been a while since we put together one of these off the cuff style episodes, but this week we have six topics for you that we wanted to discuss. Plus, for our subscribers, we have two bonus topics for this week's Swing Shift episode.

John The first one we want to cover is not so much a domestic violence case, but it's really just an interesting case that happened in Florida that we wanted to cover. And in the interest of full disclosure, before I even start talking about this, I will tell everyone that I am obsessed with pickleball. Yes, I know some of our listeners will already know that, and they will know that about me. But I play a lot. I play like four times a week at this point for like three hours, and it is quietly taking over my life. Um, but it can get very competitive and testy even when you're in a rec center setting. What happened was Sunday, February eighth, around eleven a m local deputies from Port Orange in, of course, Florida, were sent out to the Spruce Creek Country Club after reports of a brawl on the pickleball courts involving as many as twenty people and fire and ambulances were also sent. Two people were arrested. It was Anthony and Julianne Sapienza. They are ages sixty three and fifty one.

Shaun So grown adults, grown adults.

John So apparently they were playing doubles, which is usually what you do. And Anthony accused the other team of having stepped into the kitchen, which is not allowed. So if you don't know, the kitchen is the area within seven feet of the net on either side, and it's there so that people don't walk right up to the net and slam the ball on the other team. So it's like a place you can't hit the ball out of the air. So it's the non-volley zone or the kitchen. You can't go in it. And he said that the other team went into it, which would have been a fault, and they would have lost the point. So after the game, Anthony apparently yelled to the other team, your wife is a expletive word that I'm not going to say on the podcast. So the guy told Anthony not to talk to his wife that way, of course. And Anthony walked up to him and allegedly punched him in the face and also allegedly hit him in the head with his pickleball paddle, causing, as you might imagine, a lot of bleeding. If you've never seen or held a pickleball paddle, it has quite a sharp edge and you could really, really use it to hurt someone.

Shaun Like a and it's designed for, for whacking things too. It's very light and made of.

John Solid, really hard and really fast.

Shaun Yeah.

John Um, typically not skulls though.

Shaun Yeah.

John He also pushed the man's wife down to the ground when she tried to help her husband. And then another person, a seventy year old, tried to break up the fight, and Anthony allegedly punched him in the face as well. So a witness called nine one one. I listened to the nine hundred eleven call. It was wild. And before the police showed up, Anthony and his wife fled the scene. But they were both picked up pretty quickly because everybody knew exactly who they were. Julianne was arrested on a charge of felony battery on a person sixty five or older, and Anthony was arrested on two counts of felony battery of a person sixty five or older and aggravated battery causing bodily harm. In the charging documents, they referred to the pickleball paddle as a deadly weapon. So as much as this is an incredibly crazy thing to have happened, it's very serious for these two. So it'll be interesting to see what happens. Their initial hearing is scheduled for March third, and we'll keep you informed on what happens with this. But this is absolutely crazy. People need to keep their chill when they're playing pickleball.

Shaun Was there anything about the extent of the injuries?

John He was hit in the head with a pickleball paddle. He's fine. No one has lasting injuries, but he was bleeding a lot as head injuries do. And they they took him to the hospital. He's going to be fine.

Shaun Okay? I was the deadly weapon. Thing is wild.

John Yeah, it really is. I mean, it's no different than hitting somebody with a.

Shaun With a.

John Pipe or.

Shaun Something. Yeah. True.

John You can really. You could have broken his skull.

Shaun Yeah. That is a wild story.

John For our listeners in Florida. What do you think about this story? Do you play pickleball?

Shaun John would love if people would reach out and talk with him about pickleball and your pickleball drama.

John I do, I always want to hear about pickleball drama.

Shaun The first story I have to share that I wanted to talk to John about and our listeners about is also deals I guess with a sort of game the beast games, the Mr. Beast reality competition that was created by Mr. Beast, that he's a billionaire YouTuber. His real name is Jimmy Donaldson, but everyone knows him as Mr. Beast, and he partnered with Amazon Prime Video to create what they were billing as the largest competition show ever produced. There were originally two thousand contestants, and the prize was five million dollars, and it was made up of mental and physical challenges. And this was just on on the air in late twenty twenty for the first season ended in early twenty twenty five. So about a year ago and in the end, the winner won ten million dollars, which is the largest prize, the largest prize in game show history. But it was filmed right here in Las Vegas in July of twenty twenty four at Allegiant Stadium. Well, at least the first episode, which they called episode zero with a pilot where there were two thousand contestants, competed for a thousand spots to advance to the the The Big Show, I guess. But the Vegas portion wasn't in the televised show, but it was just like that qualifying phase.

John So in the show, they just started with the thousand people who.

Shaun Qualified, but they didn't show what happened in Vegas.

John I'm getting a lot of Squid Game vibes.

Shaun Okay. It it really starts to feel like Squid Game when you hear about everything that happened.

John I haven't heard about any of this. I'm so excited.

Shaun So they were confined to the field of Allegiant. And I'm going to say again, it was Vegas and it was July.

John Oh, no.

Shaun And they were provided with sleeping bags and tents to sleep on the ground. So it wasn't like they were put up in hotels and brought to the field to compete. They basically camped out in Allegiant for four days.

John And what are the temperatures like in July here in Las Vegas?

Shaun At least one hundred and five, one hundred and eight, one hundred and ten on a football field, I don't know. I mean, it does have a roof, right?

John It does. And I assume.

Shaun It's climate controlled and it's natural grass.

John But but in the sun.

Shaun Still and for facilities they had porta potties. So I saw pictures online when the contestants showed up, you know, they had like their little roller bags. All their stuff was taken. So all their personal belongings and their medication was all collected by the staff.

John Wow.

Shaun So the logistics of just this. So you have two thousand contestants, you have producers, you have medics, you have handlers, you have people of all sides doing this, this thing with like a cast of two thousand people. It was just overwhelming. And it's been called, um, the staff was unprofessional, they were untrained and that this was a production for content like online content. Right. So that really led to issues. So right now there is a lawsuit pending in California with five of the contestants there remaining anonymous because of everything that happened to them during the production at Allegiant. So right from the start, there's claims that the contestants were not given adequate food, water, sleep, no beds. Like I said, they're sleeping in tents or sleeping bags. Um, and the medication was a real issue. So they had to hand over their clothes. They didn't have access to clean underwear for four days. But then there's some incidents where, like, really important medication, like insulin, heart medication was mishandled. It was delayed. Um, people were undernourished. People, you know, who are diabetic, like, they have to have, you know, they have to keep their blood sugar in balance. So they need to eat enough. They need to have their meds. And it was just kind of a thing where it was. Who's in charge? Where is this stuff being kept? Who's who's making sure it gets to the people it belongs to? Some people were physically hurt in the challenges. And I'll talk about that a little bit too. But also people suffered seizures and people were hospitalized. And there was one story where one of the challenges involved was a game that involved a rope, and the rope got tangled around her neck, and the other contestants were trying to pull it. So basically strangling her like she she could have died from what was happening because it was just kind of chaotic. There was one part where I guess they had to run and like, grab a jersey for the team color you wanted to be on, which led to two thousand people running, people getting trampled, people falling to the ground and being trampled. Um, and then there were actual physical fights and which, of course, like I said, a lot of this was probably filmed for content. So having conflict was probably seen as like a way to get views or clicks or attention on it. So there, there wasn't like that. Right. Kind of security. These are some of the allegations that the contestants have made about what happened.

John I take it back. It doesn't sound as much like Squid Game as it does like, um, Fyre Fest, but Fyre Fest times a thousand.

Shaun Yeah. Um, at one point, a staff member said that a contestant walked up to him and his his, um, sleeping bag was, um, soaked with with feces because the porta potties had overflowed, flowed, and he was sleeping on the ground and he got soaked with porta potty. And then the staff person was ordered to clean it up. But the staff person's like, that's not my job. I'm not trained in how to deal with this like it's a hazardous material. Yeah, but they were like, you know, you do it or you're fired. So it wasn't just the contestants that were abused. Like I said, there there were staff people who were just untrained and basically unprepared. It probably sounded fine on paper, like, oh, we'll just do a campout. Oh, we'll just, you know, bring in food. But like. Forgetting that, you know, all of these logistics, it really feels unprofessional. And that's what I read. Several folks had called it. And another thing that's being listed in the class action complaint is that, uh, women were being sexually harassed. It was a hostile conditions just all around. There were some quotes in the lawsuit where it was said that, you know, someone said if the boys calling the men competing, the boys if they wanted to be immature and it said draw dicks on the whiteboards, they should be allowed to. And the production encouraged it again, I think for content. So it does sound very immature. So like I said, the class action lawsuit was filed in September of twenty twenty four by five anonymous former contestants. They're suing Mrbeast's production company, a company called Off Ones Base and Amazon, as well their Amazon production Division, and the contestants are saying that they were basically misclassified as volunteers to avoid proper wages and benefits because basically they worked. I guess that's their argument. They worked for MrBeast to create content, and they were subjected to all of this nonsense that they weren't really informed that they would be subjected to. But none of them got any kind of compensation for it. So they were like unpaid performers. That's kind of how they're couching it under California law. And that there was, I mentioned the lack of food, medical care, and that they had emotional distress from the unsafe and hostile conditions. And they allege that the production company lied to them about the competition structure, including the number of competitors that would advance and the conditions that they would all experience.

John And after this, the production went forward and they produced the show. So yeah, there was a season one out there.

Shaun Yeah, the season one ended, just like I said, about a year ago. but season two is airing right now and the finale is February twenty fifth, so Wednesday.

John So they did it, and then they did it again.

Shaun And they and they've been renewed for a third season. Yeah.

John Wow.

Shaun So MrBeast and Amazon, they haven't really said anything about it. But MrBeast said something that like behind the scenes footage that they'll release will show that everything was blown out of proportion, but that he wasn't going to release it because it would kind of be spoilers for what was coming in the season. So he didn't want to. That was the most I could see for his explanation. And in the lawsuit, they want financial compensation for the unpaid wages, withheld benefits, damages. They want to be recognized that they were workers, employees and that they had certain legal protections that should have been in place. And they want protection going forward. And I don't know how this is going to resolve. I mean, it's a class action lawsuit. It could settle before it goes to trial. But they they asked for a jury trial. So I guess we'll see how it might resolve. But like you said, even despite everything that went wrong, that people had seizures, people were having diabetic distress from low blood sugar. And they it was just a, you know, just a shit show. They they went ahead and renewed it for two more seasons.

John I don't even know what to say about that. I didn't know about this.

Shaun I mean, I knew it was happening, but I really did not understand the scale of it or.

John Or how bad it was.

Shaun Or how bad it was.

John It sounds like it was an absolute nightmare. It really doesn't understand how people subject themselves to things like that. I mean, I understand people want to win the ten million dollars, like, okay, I understand. But at a certain point, what's the price of your safety?

Shaun Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, you kind of there's so many reality shows and they have so much fail safes. They have they worry about insurance, they worry about actual people safety. They will airlift you out of survivor if you have an injury, you know, they they they protect you and they make sure you get your medication. But one of the articles I read, the medics were like, had all the meds, right? They're in charge of it. And they were like, why are these contestants not coming to get their meds? Like there was no communication of how to distribute it. They collected it, but they didn't have a way to distribute it. And the other thing.

John I'm sure it was just a pile of pill bottles and they were like, oh, who's this one? Yeah, that's not it. Nope, that's not it. Nope.

Shaun And the contestants, I guess, were told, don't worry about over-the-counter stuff. Don't worry about your Benadryl and your Claritin and your Advil. Like, we will have all that for you and we will distribute it. But there was some.

John And did they.

Shaun Controversy that like the people who were in control of it at one point a guy like used an expletive as like someone employed by the production or volunteering for the production to tell them, like, you know, f off. Like you can't, like, I'm not giving you this. I mean, I'm kind of paraphrasing what I could remember from the articles, because I think it was channel three did a whole exposé on everything that happened at Allegiant.

John It might just be that I'm old, but I can't imagine participating in something like that.

Shaun No, it's it definitely sounds like Hunger Games Squid Game. How much pain can we put you in to get you to, you know, to win this, this money? It's really disturbing.

John All for content. I feel like everything in our world now is all for content.

Shaun Yeah. If and when that lawsuit resolves, we'll bring you all an update. But it could be. Who knows how long. This is something that I alluded to in last week's episode, because we covered the disappearance of Randy Evers. And while I was researching Randy's disappearance and what was in the press, it was compared to this other disappearance of a boy who went missing six years before Randy did. So this would have been in nineteen eighty six. A three year old boy named Francine Pierre went missing. Uh, Francine lived with his mom, Amy, and his stepdad, Lee in Las Vegas, and his biological dad, Jean-Pierre lived in Haiti. Francine was actually born in Haiti and but was living here in the US with his mom and his, uh, his stepdad. So even just there kind of sounds a little bit like Randy, right? Like Randy's was living with his step mother and bio dad, but, um, so very similar and same age. So he was about three years old when his parents reported him missing. They said they had taken him to the Broadacres swap meet on August two, nineteen eighty six. And while Lee was looking at a bike for Francine and Amy was buying food at a food stall, they just lost sight of him and he disappeared. So during the investigation, of course, the police did all the usual thing the canvassing, the posters. But it turned out that a few months earlier, Francine had been severely beaten by Lee and Amy, and they had punished him in many severe and sadistic ways, Like they made him sleep outside. They made him run laps around their coffee table. And both parents admitted to this, and it was said that Francine had received a beating so bad that it was thirty to forty welts on his body. And he's just a little three year old kid. It's just it's really horrible. And they were scheduled to have a hearing about that child abuse on August twenty sixth. So the boy disappeared on August second and the hearing was August twenty sixth. There were, in all the newspaper documents, multiple documented published inconsistencies in their stories, including that Lee lied to the police, that he worked as a stockbroker for Lehman Brothers, which led the police to think that maybe the boy was taken for ransom. They also told the police they never used babysitters, but later admitted they did use babysitters and people friends of the couple, their neighbors that they had recently seen Francine. But it turned out that no one had seen him for a couple of weeks, and both the parents failed lie detector tests. So just thinking about when people were suspicious of Randy's parents for Randy's disappearance, Randy disappeared from a party where there were fifteen or so people there. Fifteen adults. No allegations of child abuse? No. And they put right in the paper directly what the parents had lied about. That was, uh, you know, they tried to mislead the police. They kept saying that in the papers. The prosecutors and the cops were saying they were being evasive or they had lied, but there were nothing specific was ever in the paper. But for Francine's parents, I can tell you very directly where they said they said this and that was a lie. They said this and that was a lie. So that was a really weird contrast for me where both sets of parents fell under suspicion. But it's very clear to me why Amy and Lee were under suspicion. Their inconsistencies were so strong that they were actually charged with obstruction of justice, and they were sent to jail pending trial.

John Oh my gosh.

Shaun And the police hoped they would implicate themselves during the incarceration. But after spending a few months in jail, they pleaded guilty to obstruction and to child abuse, and they were placed on probation. And two weeks after Francine disappeared, his parents were selling his items at a yard sale. So compared to Randy, remember I said they executed that search warrant on the house, expecting to see that none of Randy's things were there, but they actually were there. I think that's where Francine's story influenced how they handled Randy's. The couple moved to Florida and they continued to point the finger at Jean-Pierre. Francine's bio dad claiming.

John Any evidence that he had been in Las Vegas?

Shaun No, I don't think so.

John No.

Shaun And no evidence that Francine had left the country. And Jeanne passed a lie detector test and he was cleared of all suspicion. So just going back to Randy's story, when Randy disappeared, there was a lot in the paper Accusing Matt and Tina Evers of being responsible for Randy's disappearance, but the police never came forward, or the prosecutors never came forward with whatever evidence they had that Tina and Mike were responsible. They were never charged with obstruction, in contrast to Francine's parents, and there was no allegations of child abuse. Like I said, against Mike or Tina or anyone involved in the case, at least fifteen people, as I said, were at the party when Randy disappeared and presumably could give statements that they saw him there. But meanwhile, Francine's parents didn't have any witnesses that could definitively place Francine at the swap meet. And a few of their neighbors, like I said, said they hadn't seen him for a week.

John So it's possible he was never even at the swap meet.

Shaun It's very possible. In nineteen ninety eight. This part is a little is quite disturbing, actually. In nineteen ninety eight, a child's skull and bones were found on the shores of Lake Mead, and Lee told the police that he had taken Francine on a camping trip at Lake Mead several days before the boy had disappeared. So Lee told the detectives he didn't kill Francine, but said that if he had killed him, he would have cut him up. That was reported in the Review-Journal.

John My God.

Shaun So police determined that what he said happened on the Lake Mead trip was inconsistent and did not appear to be believable. The next day in the paper, the police said that the remains found at Lake Mead probably were not Francine's because the hair was light colored, which wouldn't have matched Francine. Francine is biracial. Black and white. So I tried to look in the archives to find more about when these remains were found, or who they might have been identified to. There's nothing in Namus that lists the remains of a child found in nineteen ninety eight at Lake Mead. So I'm assuming at some point they were identified. But I wish I could tell you. I went through Namus and I said it to between ninety seven and ninety nine, and I searched for child and I searched for Lake Mead, both on Arizona side and Nevada side, because it's not clear from this where from that news article where it was found. And but I couldn't find I didn't find anyone still unidentified, but I also couldn't find anything in the archives to tell me when it was identified or who it turned out to be. So like I said, that part of the story is really disturbing. In twenty seventeen, someone tried to steal Franklin's identity. Someone went to North Las Vegas Public Records and tried to get a birth certificate in his name. So that had the detectives take a second look at the disappearance. And they did have a press conference, and they said sadly, like they wished that it had been the break they had waited for, that they could say he had been found alive. But they discovered that while Amy and Lee were jailed for obstruction. They were exchanging letters and one of them was Amy. Writing to Lee. What happened was totally unintentional. I'm sorry. I hope you know that. A witness also came forward and told police that on March ten, nineteen eighty seven, they had overheard a conversation between Lee and an unknown woman during a jail visit, and they said that at one point Lee got very, very excited and he stood up and he yelled, Amy killed the baby and threw his head down on a table. The detective also contacted the person who performed the original polygraph exams back in nineteen eighty six of Amy and Lee, and that polygraph examiner told the detective that Amy was so deceptive during her polygraph that he came away with the impression that she had killed the boy and hid his body in Lake Mead. The statement was redacted. So it was Amy and name omitted. So. But so another person's name was mentioned in that statement. But it was redacted for some reason out of the RJ and out of what? North Las Vegas put forward. And I think most likely all of us are kind of reaching the conclusion that it had to be Lee's name, because that's all that would really make sense.

John Who else's name could it be?

Shaun So this evidence led to Amy being arrested in January of twenty nineteen on open murder, and in late twenty twenty one, she entered an Alford plea to voluntary manslaughter. She was sentenced to two years max, but had already had credit for over four hundred and seventy one days served. So in the end she served about eight months and although he is believed to be deceased, Francine is still missing. He's a biracial. He was a biracial boy, um, half black African American and half white. He had black hair, brown eyes, and his nickname was yo yo. As I mentioned, he was of Haitian descent. He was born in Haiti, and he was three years old when he was last seen, but he'd be forty three years old today, and if you have any information, you can call the North Las Vegas Police Department at seven oh two six four nine nine one one one.

John It makes sense that this influenced how they looked at Randy Evers case.

Shaun I think so. They the only thing that was very different was how I couldn't find any specific details as to why they were so suspicious of Mike and and Tina, other than the fact that Mike was kind of passed out when they came to the house and that they failed the question as to where their son was when the polygraph. At least that's according to Tina. But there. But like I said, there's so much details in Francine's story where you could see right through what the parents were doing and that there were so many witnesses that that weren't sure the last time they had seen the boy and the fact that they sold his stuff. But you didn't. I didn't read anything like that about Mike and Tina, Except the only thing I think they did that made them feel guilty was that they seem guilty. I could see people would put that spin on as the fact that they moved away very quickly, but like I said, they were being harassed. They had the radio deejays calling them.

John They were getting doxed and harassed.

Shaun You know, it's um, these are both really, really hard stories about, you know, three year old boys in our community that disappeared and are still unsolved for the most part. No one knows where Francine is.

John Horrible.

Shaun Or Randy.

John All right, well, the next story we have is more of a tech corner type story. And it's about ring cameras. So if you don't have a ring camera or you've been living under a rock and you don't know what a ring camera is, basically it's an ecosystem of devices that are that include video doorbells, security cameras, things like that, even home security systems that are marketed to keep you safe and they really lean into the anti-crime angle. So prevent package theft and things like that. You know, stay safe at home, know who's at your door, things like that. And if you watch the Super Bowl a couple weeks ago, you may have seen the ring camera Super Bowl ad and they talked about a new feature called Search Party, and they focused it on how it was going to be used to locate lost dogs. So the way it would work is you upload images of your dog into the ring app, and you start a search party when they're gone. And that would activate nearby ring cameras, and it would use AI to help locate your dog based on using video from other people's ring cameras and ring devices. So immediately people started being concerned that this could, in fact be extended to identifying people using facial recognition to allow for, you know, locating people in the community identified that way. And there were, of course, concerns that Ice might be using that technology. I will say that there's no indication that Ice is using this technology now. But that's not to say that it could never happen. The CEO of ring is a man named Jamie Siminoff, and he has always been a very strong advocate for community safety initiatives, going back to like twenty seventeen when they originally pitched the ring camera on Shark Tank. That's where it came from. So originally they had partnerships with police departments across the country up until like twenty twenty three. They would give these devices to to police departments and police officers and have them give give them away to people in the community or people in the department to get them out there in the community and being used. Essentially, what four hundred and four media wrote was that we, the citizens, were voluntarily building ourselves a surveillance dragnet using these things. There was also a partnership with Ring and Flock Safety. Flock safety is a company that does automated license plate reader technology. So these are like pole based cameras that they sell to municipalities, and they can read license plates. And law enforcement will put these things up. And they can, you know, identify stolen cars and things like that. So ring was going to enter into a partnership with Flock Safety, but it ended up being cancelled. On the ring blog, they said that the integration between the two technologies was going to be too difficult, but that one especially really flagged everyone as being something that was pretty dystopian. If they started to use facial recognition technology and automated license plate readers and things like that.

Shaun It's like George Orwell was one hundred percent right. He was just, you know, forty five years off in his timing.

John Absolutely. Flock currently doesn't use any facial recognition there, just license plate readers. So like I said, there will be no integration between the two that we know of so far. But Ice does use flocks license plate database to search for people. So I think that was where some of the concerns were that if ring partnered with Flock and Ice is using flocks technology, therefore Ice would be using rings, rings, databases and technology and cameras. And that's not quite true. As they said in the four hundred and four media article. That's really too many leaps. That's not happening right now, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on. And they actually obtained a letter that was written by Simonoff, where he said about the search party feature that it was introduced first for finding dogs, but that it or features like it would be expanded to zero out crime in neighborhoods. And you can now see a future where we are about to zero out crime in neighborhoods. And that was a letter that went out from the CEO to everyone in the company at ring.

Shaun I'm going to say this. I feel like that's a really ignorant statement to make. I mean, most of our podcast is focused on domestic violence, and when you are a victim of domestic violence, it's not by definition, it's not a stranger. It's someone who's already in your house, in your space. You're not going to be able to zero out crime just because you have a camera at your front door.

John I totally agree, and I think probably what he's talking about is.

Shaun I know.

John Package.

Shaun Yeah. And cars and maybe even break ins. I could see that. Um, but there are plenty of people who break in and are caught on ring cameras or surveillance cameras at businesses. Steal the tip jar right off the counter. Absolutely true. I just feel like I understand that that's his brand and that's that's the mess. That's his goal. That's my goal too. But I don't, but I just I feel like that's a little bit shortsighted.

John And I also think that when they think about crime, there's no way they're thinking about domestic violence.

Shaun And they should be, but they're not. They're thinking about, yeah, like you said.

John It's got to be.

Shaun Property smash and grab. Yeah.

John Um, and, you know, packaged, packaged stuff. Yeah. So ring also introduced a new feature called Familiar Faces. And what that allows you to do is upload faces of familiar people that, you know, maybe you know, your postal worker or members of your family. So you upload them into your app and then it will be able to say in the ring camera app, it'll be able to say, John is at the front door. And that does use facial recognition. So you can see sort of the different pieces of the thing coming together, and especially when they add AI into the mix. So it goes from being just taking video, uploading it into the cloud to now you being able to ask questions of the video and say, did you see anyone with a backpack in in this time frame?

Shaun Yeah.

John Yeah. So that's that's where it starts to get really, uh, Orwellian and dystopian.

Shaun I yeah, I hundred percent agree with you. And I can also see that maybe being used as a stalking tool in a way.

John It absolutely could if someone has access to your ring camera.

Shaun If search party could be like, you know, where was person or where, you know, I mean, it's like any tool, right? You can misuse it. I could see it being really helpful when a child goes missing or an elderly person, maybe with dementia goes missing, that it would be easy to like, let's pull together all our cameras and find them. But it's yeah, very easy to abuse.

John I mean, it's only one step from my mom with dementia has gone missing. Help me find her to oh my gosh, my girlfriend is missing. Help me find her. And the story behind that is that she has left him and is trying to get safe. And these ring cameras are helping him locate her. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that people are worried about. Yeah. Another thing that happened was that when Charlie Kirk was murdered, the CEO sent out another email out to the company saying searching for Charlie Kirk's killer would have been the perfect use for their new features. Currently, the community Requests feature is configurable, and you can turn off the features that you don't want to allow. For example, you might want to allow pet searching, and there's another feature called Firewatch, which can help report fires, but you can disallow features you don't want. And I actually checked the app and the only two features that exist in the app now that you can enable and disable are pet, Search Party, and Firewatch. So if you have the ring app and ring security in your home, you can go to the ring app and then disable them. They have said that these features are in the customer's hands and fully configurable, and you can opt out of them, but importantly, by default you are opted in. So if you want to opt out, you have to go into the app and manually opt out of them. And don't forget that Amazon acquired ring in twenty eighteen. Amazon famously has a hit and miss relationship with respecting privacy.

Shaun And we've companies have done this many times where they they just change the rules on us like you agree to the terms of service. And then somewhere in there they just change it. And you have to agree to continue to use the product. And then at some point your, you know, your data is being harvested and sold or you're you're opted in and you don't even realize it.

John And it can be difficult because you have, you know, maybe you have a doorbell camera attached to your house and you have camera, you have a camera on your garage on the side of your house, on the back of your house. If they change the rules, your choice is to take all that hardware that you've spent hundreds of dollars on and selling it on eBay, or donating it, or agreeing to the new terms and conditions and then finding yourself a new ecosystem. The next story we wanted to cover was horribly heartbreaking. It concerns a thirty four year old woman named Tanya McGeehan and her eleven year old daughter, Addison Smith Addie, who were from West Jordan, Utah. They were here in Las Vegas for a cheer competition, and they were staying at the Rio Hotel and Resort, which is just a few minutes off the strip. Addison was here with the Utah Extreme Cheer team. Sunday, February fifteenth. Around ten forty five a m, Metro was called in to do a welfare check because Addie and her mom had not shown up at the cheer competition and the cheer team was worried about them. According to police, they showed up, knocked on the door to their hotel room, and then contacted the Rio security team. They knocked several times and called inside for them but didn't get an answer. And then around two thirty p m that same day. Just a few hours later, hotel security came back again amidst a flood of calls to nine hundred eleven and the hotel. They made the decision to enter the room, and they found that both Addie and her mom, Tanya, were deceased. Security left the room and called nine one one. It appears what happened was that Tanya had killed her eleven year old daughter with a handgun, and then died herself by suicide. Court documents showed that Tanya and her ex-husband Brad Smith, who she divorced in twenty fifteen, had a horribly bitter custody battle over Addison since she was very, very young. Originally, Tanya was the primary parent, but she had quite a few run ins with the police between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty related to custody, specifically around custodial interference and some electronic communication. Harassment. Custodial interference generally involves Preventing a child from seeing a parent who is legally entitled to see them or visit them. On December four, twenty twenty, a court temporarily awarded custody of Addison to her dad. The court cited findings that Tanya had committed domestic abuse in front of her daughter, and engaged in behavior aimed at alienating her from her father, and the judge at the time wrote that her. The judge wrote at the time that her co-parenting skills relating to appropriately communicating with the other parent and encouraging the sharing of love and affection is seriously in question. Based on the evidence and proffers that have been provided, the custody dispute continued through the courts and was not fully resolved until twenty twenty four, when a ruling granted her joint custody. And I just want to note here also, there are no records of any criminal activity from Addie's dad related to his marriage to Tanya. Nothing at all. They seem to agree, and Addison was alternating weeks with her parents. They exchanged Addison to school, and if school wasn't in session, they had to exchange her at the police station. That same order mandated that Brad and Tonya had to park at least five parking spaces away from each other, which is a pretty big red flag. A GoFundMe has been set up to help Addie's dad with her final expenses, and we will share that. This really reminded us of another case that we shared recently of Ashley and Dennis Prince here in Las Vegas, which was another bitter custody battle that ended in violence and murder.

Shaun I don't think it can be overstated how these family court cases, the emotions run so high. Those red flags apply regardless of gender. All right. Our final story today is hopefully to leave you all on like a lighter note, because some of the cases we talked about this week were very serious. But this is a story about Cardi B, so Cardi B was just in town on February thirteenth, uh, performing. Um, she had a concert and part of the choreography during the performance had her sitting backwards in a chair and leaning down towards the stage. And while she was doing that, the chair tipped. She landed on her back on the stage, but she didn't miss a beat like she recovered quickly. She continued with the performance and just a few seconds later when she got up and was, you know, dancing and rapping, she pointed at the chair and declared jokingly, that was the government. And when the video started getting shared on social media, she posted, can someone put a community note on this? This video is clearly AI and I just I have I'm such a fan of Cardi. Like she's just so authentic. She has a brilliant sense of humor, even about herself or how this flub happened during her show. And I just, I thought that was a a charming story that, you know, she blamed the government for falling down on stage. And I was amused not only by her statement and her joking around about the video being AI, um, that, uh, some news outlets put out that headline as if Cardi was sincerely blaming the government for what had happened. Uh, and that's partly because she had a little beef with the government earlier this month when she said that she'd stand up to ice. I think she mentioned using bear mace if they tried to come to her concerts and harass her fans, and the Department of Homeland Security responded back to her, referencing some, you know, alleged misdeeds in Cardi's past, saying, you know, referencing her drugging and robbing, um, clients of hers. And then Cardi said, back to Homeland Security. If you want to talk about drugs, let's talk about the Epstein files and girls getting drugged and raped. So I don't I they had a little back and forth, but she's just such a mix of being serious and being outspoken, but also having a brilliant sense of humor, even about herself. And I just I love that that happened in Vegas. And, um, part of me wishes we could have been there at the concert, but, um, and she was fine and it she's, you know, was fine. She didn't get hurt or anything. But if you've seen the video, I find it hilarious.

John So we're also going to cover two more stories in the swing shift. So if you're not subscribed, make sure you head to subscribe so you can listen to that.

Shaun And if you have any ideas for stories you want us to cover, either on our off the cuff episodes that we're doing every month or so, or as a regular case on the of our typical podcast content, all you have to do is reach out. We'd love to hear from you.

John We are happy to research cases people are interested in.

Shaun And talk about whatever you'd like to hear us talk about.

John Yes.

Shaun But until then, thank you for listening. And remember, what happens here happens everywhere.

John Thanks for listening. Visit since podcasts. Subscribe for exclusive bonus content and to listen ad free. Remember to like and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and threads @sinsandsurvivors If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a review on your podcast platform of choice. You can contact us at Questions@sinsandsurvivors.com

Shaun If you or someone you know is affected by domestic violence or need support, please reach out to local resources or the National Domestic Violence Hotline. A list of resources is available on our website sinsandsurvivors.com Sins and survivors, a Las Vegas true crime podcast is researched, written, and produced by your host, Shaun and John. The information shared in this podcast is accurate at the time of recording. If you have questions, concerns or corrections, please email us. Links to source material for this episode can be found on our website. sinsandsurvivors.com

John The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast creators, hosts, and their guests. All individuals are innocent until proven guilty. This content does not constitute legal advice. Listeners are encouraged to consult with legal professionals for guidance.