Yep. The cops & feds regularly use illegal means to gather evidence. Then they make up a story about how they could have hypothetically gathered it legally.

It’s called “parallel construction,” and it needs to be explicitly outlawed.

I wholly believe the same. If LM used a mobile device of any kind at any point during his mission, it would be possible to trace his whereabouts and match the path of the shooter to the path of LM. I further believe that the fast food industry (specifically MDs and its associations that lobby to continue the rampant unchecks of processed food) is behind the hit. Or at the very least, is using it as a PR opportunity to deflect blame of health problems in America to the health insurance industry. They are, after all, facing another lawsuit for causing diabetes that was officially filed on the same week as the shooting: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrmbomype/Martinez%20v%20Kraft%20Heinz%20et%20al%20complaint%2012-10.pdf

Md and Starbucks are business partners. How convenient that every mention of this case is accompanied by both their names being lauded as the hero who put a “terrorist” behind bars.

There is a certain smell of parallel construction. I hope his legal team is very thorough in examining every little detail, tearing apart time-lines of events, chains of custody, witnesses and find any holes at all in the public narrative if this is the case. One hopes that the parallel construction is in the way of they used illegal surveillance and intelligence capabilities to catch him and it could bring their whole case down, not in the way of they made up a claim that someone at McDonalds called the cops but really they were doing basic legal detective stuff tracking greyhound buses.

This is someone who fell off the entire grid for three months??

Its very easy to hide when nobody is looking for you.

And that the police took the report seriously, to dedicate enough resources and shoot no one. They suspected he'd have a weapon, and no bullets flew from a group known for weak trigger discipline.

How many shitty fake reports from the poor sighted and easily convinced did they need to sift through to jump up for this one.

Mcds is a red herring. They tracked him via the Greyhound bus database. He was dumb and rose the bus using the same fake id. The bus just happened to stop at a mcds when they caught up with it. .

I don't buy the conspiracy theories and "the Man sees everything and needed a plausible excuse" theories (although I'll admit the Man does see a lot more than he should...)

But I will say this: I find it extremely odd that a random McD employee in Fucktown, Nowhere, 275 miles from NYC, recognized a hooded dude wanted for murder in NYC, for the following reasons:

• McD employees don't look at patrons. They're bored shitless and they're not paid well enough to care. You could show up at any McD joint disguised as Elton John with a feather up your ass and the employee behind the counter would still tell you "Would you like fries with that" while looking right through you.

• Do you follow the local news in a city 275 miles from where you live? I don't. And even assuming it's NYC and it's a big enough city that people in Altoona pay attention, there's a murder every 12 hours in NYC. Why would that one in particular enter the consciousness of a bored employee in a burger joint in Altoona.

• Can you recognize a hooded guy you saw on a still photograph? I can't. I might have suspicions, but I'm almost certain I wouldn't be positive enough to call the cops. And again, I work at McD and all I really want is go home after my shift. So I might just forget I saw someone I might have vaguely recognized.

The most likely story I have heard is that these automated kiosks at McDonalds have built in face-recognition, but there is no officially legal agreement between law-enforcement and McDonalds to share this data, so they hushed it up with the unlikely story that an employee recognized Luigi.

I personally don't think he did it. He could easily be a grifter trying to take credit for a very popular act. There's no shortage of those. All you'd need to do:

• Walk into a public place with a bag of somewhat incriminating items, but nothing that's linked to the actual crime scene.
• Arouse enough suspicion to get the cops called on you. Being a white guy with black hair and a hoodie is not enough for someone to call the cops on you, I have no idea why people believe that was enough for a McD's employee to call the cops.
• Claim credit for the shooting to the cops.
• Bonus points - Have a social media history praising similar actions.

The altoona cops then forwarded this to the NYPD, who were desperate to pin this on someone, after they messed up and let the shooter slip through their fingers. Out of the all the tips, this was the best one they'd gotten so far, so they're running with it now.

This also explains why Luigi's taking credit for some, but not all of the claims the police made (especially about the money he was supposedly carrying).

Three months? And no one correcting you on that? WTF? Couple of days between shooting and arrest...!

Other than that: yeah, unlikely anyone could recognize anyone from those pubished photos.