Cops used Tinder to track down man convicted in drug killing outside Wichita health club
Wichita police used account information obtained from the Tinder dating app to help track down a man ordered to spend life in prison for a deadly drug deal in a local health club parking lot in 2019.
Tanner Mora, 27, was sentenced Wednesday in the shooting death of Lorenzo Wade, whose bullet-riddled body was found by a plastic bag of marijuana outside of a health club on West 13th St. on Feb. 6, 2019.
Prosecutors contend the 22-year-old’s killing was the result of a drug deal that went south when it turned into a robbery. Wade’s autopsy reports says he was shot seven times in the back plus had more gunshot wounds on his buttocks, hand and arms.
A jury convicted Mora of first-degree felony murder in February. He will be eligible for parole after serving 25 years of the sentence, handed down by Judge David Dahl, according to a news release from the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office.
Another man charged in the case, Ashantis Bledsoe, is still awaiting trial.
Although there were surveillance video cameras that caught footage of the shooters’ fleeing car and a witness who heard gunfire while waiting for his windshield to defrost, it was Tanner’s digital footprint that led investigators to his doorstep.
An arrest affidavit filed in the murder case details how authorities solved it:
After officers arrived in the health club parking lot following a 911 call about the shooting, they found Wade’s body with a bag of marijuana between his legs and a gray cellphone in his pocket. Two people Wade knew showed up at the shooting scene after he didn’t return to a nearby apartment where he’d been prior and they told police that he had headed to the parking lot to meet someone.
Investigators scrolled through Wade’s cellphone to see who he’d talked to that night and found messages from a “Text Now” number that talked of meeting up and “getting something.”
Police obtained a search warrant for information associated with the “Text Now” phone number, including the email address used to set up the account. A subsequent search warrant served to Google helped police obtain information about when and where the email address was created. That same email address, they learned, had been used to set up Mora’s Facebook and Instagram pages, as well as his Plenty of Fish and Tinder dating profiles.
Mora’s Tinder account also had been set up using the same “Text Now” number that Wade had swapped messages with the night he was killed.
The IP address tied to Mora’s last Tinder log in was a west Wichita apartment apartment complex where he had been living with a friend to “dry out” from a meth addiction. Authorities arrested him there.
In a police interview, Mora confirmed that he owned the email address and had used it to open his dating profiles and Facebook account.
This story was originally published September 24, 2020 at 10:51 AM.
