Rodney Bradford might have been just another New York teenager arrested and charged with burglary had it not been for his Facebook account. As it has turned out, time spent on the internet has proved to be time well spent for him. He is the first person to be cleared of a crime as a result of an update on his Facebook profile. It’s the Facebook defense alibi!

The 19-year-old was arrested on October 18, 2009 for suspicion of robbery. He was accused of mugging Jeremy Dunklebarger and Rolando Perez-Lorenzo at gunpoint where he lives in the Farragut Houses in Brooklyn, New York. One of the crime victims picked him out of a line-up and he was sent to the New York City jail on Rikers Island on charges of robbery in the first degree. He was already facing a robbery indictment from a separate incident in happened in 2008.

Bradford sat in jail for two weeks, until his father happened to see that he had updated his Facebook profile on the date he was accused of committing the crime. The robbery occurred on October 17, 2009 and Bradford insisted he had been in Harlem at his father’s apartment on that day. His father, Rodney Bradford, Sr. and stepmother, Ernestine Bradford, backed up his claim.

It wasn’t until the Facebook alibi was found that the burglary charges against him were dropped. The time-stamp on his latest facebook update was 11:49 a.m. on Saturday, October 17, 2009. That was exactly one minute before the two men were mugged in Brooklyn. Facebook was able to verify that it was updated from Bradford’s father’s apartment in Harlem.

So what did Rodney Bradford write that turned out to be his alibi? ‘On the phone with this fat chick… where my IHOP.’ Apparently, that was a playful jab at his pregnant girlfriend who was miffed that he had gone to IHOP to eat the night before without her.

Who would have ever expected a message like that would get someone out of jail on Rikers Island?

Experts on internet social networking sites and crime report that these types of sites have been used as part of the prosecution in several cases in the past, but it is believed that Rodney Bradford’s use of the Facebook defense is the first time a social networking site has provided an alibi for a crime.




The Facebook Defense Alibi - Video