Voicemails are dying out. Thanks to the smartphone generation’s reliance on texting, phone calls are often a last resort of the highest urgency, at which point if your recipient doesn’t pick up, you might as well hang up and send a text. Voicemails have become, for many people, the exclusive domain of parents and doctor’s offices. That being said, it still has one definitive advantage: Catching criminals dumb enough to leave a voicemail revealing their plans to commit a crime.
That’s how New Orleans police became aware of a plot to burglarize Rob Ryan’s house back when he was still defensive coordinator for the Saints. A public sector worker left her cellphone at work over one weekend in August of last year, and picked it up to find 11 missed calls from a local number and one voicemail. The voicemail said, in part: “He’s just a regular football coach. … He ain’t … big … like Lil’ Wayne or nobody … that got bodyguards everywhere.”
The accidental recipient of the voicemail immediately reported it to the police, who then stationed cops outside Ryan’s home for the weekend to prevent any wrongdoing. Authorities were eventually able to connect the voicemail to the phone numbers of two men who were suspects in a string of holdups and robberies in affluent areas of New Orleans, and the two are facing a host of charges now. Maybe they should have waited until they got each other on the line before dropping details over the phone.
(Via New Orleans Advocate)
