By Jamin Daly
Assistant Criminal District Attorney in Collin County
For several weeks in late 2022, a teenage boy in Frisco was stalked by a serial burglar who had become obsessed with him. Over the course of a month, this man looked into the boy’s room from the shadows outside his window, broke into the home multiple times, set up a camera in the boy’s bedroom, and took mementos from the house. Police were called multiple times but were never able to catch the guy in the act. Eventually he would be shot in the neighbor’s yard, linked to his crimes by a plethora of forensics, and sentenced to life in prison.
This case was more than just a good result, though. It taught me valuable lessons about the significance of working the process and letting young prosecutors have important roles.
This was one of the first cases I tried after spending more than a year and a half in our Crimes Against Children unit. For anyone who has spent any amount of time prosecuting those cases, you know that evidence tends to be scarce: a child’s testimony, maybe a journal entry or text message, and, if you’re lucky, pictures of the offense location. This case was a sea change from the ones I had been trying. The evidence was an embarrassment of riches: DNA from multiple items on multiple dates; fingerprints from the child’s home; fingerprints from a neighbor’s home; 911 calls; home security system data; security camera footage, items the defendant left behind; items the defendant took; digital forensics from the home’s wi-fi router, defendant’s phone, and his cloud account; and on and on.
I am grateful we also had detectives working the case who were not content with having merely connected the defendant to the offense they were investigating. By continuing to pull at the threads they saw, they uncovered a much more complete picture of this defendant and how prolific and dangerous he really was. By the time they completed their investigation, they had discovered two of his previous victims, as well as another individual and five other families he had preyed upon. Combining all this with a new felony prosecutor who had the right attitude put us in a position to get the right result.
The investigation
In November 2022, a 15-year-old boy was spending the night alone at his home in Frisco while his father was out of state on business. He woke up when his dog started barking around midnight. As he lay in bed trying to go back to sleep, he started hearing noises—things being moved in the kitchen, doors opening and closing, and leaves crunching under someone’s foot outside. Then he saw a shadow moving outside his window. He wanted to call the police, but he also didn’t want to be the boy who cried wolf, so he decided to look out the window. After quietly moving to the window, he quickly popped the blinds open and saw a man’s face looking right at him. He jumped back, grabbed his phone, and immediately called police. By the time they arrived, the man was nowhere to be found.
For a while, it seemed like this was a one-time incident. That changed a month later when the boy came home from sports practice to find a box of bandages sitting on his bed. He asked his dad about them, but his dad said that he had not been in the room. He went back into his room and saw that the home’s wi-fi router, which was on his dresser, had been turned around. It was while he was looking at the router that he noticed a camera had been set up on the dresser. Someone had clearly taken steps to hide it. Bandages, presumably from the box on the bed, had been placed around the outside of the camera in an attempt to camouflage it, the red light that indicated when the camera was in use had been covered with electrical tape, and a sock from his drawer had been wrapped around the camera’s base. The boy also noticed a charging block and cable plugged into his power strip that had not been there before. Police came out and collected the items. They also found a used bandage with blood on it outside the boy’s window, and they checked the router to see if any unknown devices had connected to it.
Now that they knew someone had been inside their house, the boy’s father bought a home security system and installed it over the weekend. Just a few days later, while neither of them were home one afternoon, the security system picked up movement inside the house. Police were again called, and again they found no one there. This time, however, they finally got a lead as to who might be burglarizing the house: In addition to the officers finding fingerprints on a window screen and some plastic molding left behind in the boy’s room, one of the newly installed cameras captured a video of someone leaving through the back door. As police were reviewing the video, a neighbor came by to say fingerprints had been taken from one of their windows after an attempted break-in, and they had been told that a match had been made to Deketric Love.
Officers pulled up Love’s information, and his driver’s license picture appeared to match the person in the security camera video. The Frisco Police Department immediately went to work tracking down Love, doing surveillance on his last known address, and visiting places he had recently worked, but to no avail.
Three days later, the boy was up late doing homework when he started hearing familiar sounds outside his window. He was able to peek out the bottom of his blinds and saw someone’s foot as he moved around the corner. He went and alerted his dad, who got a gun, and the two of them went outside to confront whoever was out there. This confrontation happened in their neighbor’s side yard, where the dad attempted to shoot the ground near Love to keep him from running away before police could arrive, but he ended up hitting Love in the leg. Love was able to jump a fence and get away, but he was stopped while trying to drive out of the neighborhood. He claimed he had been shot while delivering Uber Eats to someone. When police returned to the neighbor’s yard, officers found a jar of petroleum jelly on the ground where Love had been shot, and several globs of the jelly formed a trail back to the boy’s window.
With Love arrested and in custody, detectives tried to link him to these offenses. They had plenty to work with. Fingerprints on the charging block, plastic molding, and window screen all matched Love. Crime-scene investigators were also able to develop a thumbprint from the adhesive side of one of the bandages that had been stuck to the camera. Wetwop, which is print powder suspended in a solution thicker than water, was painted onto the adhesive surface, allowed to settle, then rinsed off. The process was repeated multiple times until sufficient ridge detail for a comparison was developed. The thumbprint came back to Love. DNA from the blood on the used bandage outside the boy’s window, as well as DNA from the charging block and the camera itself, was compared to Love’s, and they were a match. Location data from Love’s cell phone put him at the house not only on the three occasions police knew about, but also on half a dozen others. Information from Love’s phone also showed that he had used an application associated with the camera, and that his phone was one of the devices on the router’s connection log.
Based on all of this evidence, Love was charged with Burglary of a Habitation and Burglary of a Habitation with Attempt to Commit Invasive Visual Recording.
Building a punishment case
This case was already set for trial by the time I became chief of the court where it was pending. It was assigned to prosecutor Baileigh Hale, and she set up a roundtable meeting with everyone at Frisco PD who had worked on these cases shortly after I took over. Right before we left for that meeting, we were told that she was being moved to our Crimes Against Children division and a misdemeanor prosecutor was being promoted to take her place. In virtually the same breath, Andrew Eberlein was told that he was being promoted and then invited to come with us to Frisco PD. Andrew threw himself headlong into this case, and his tireless efforts over the next several months, along with the hard work of the detectives, resulted in a punishment case that included seven extraneous victims.
The first was one of the victims from Love’s previous Online Solicitation of a Minor charge, a case from six years prior for which Love was still on deferred out of another county. Andrew got a copy of the offense report and used the information therein to track down the victim. He was initially hesitant to speak with us, but over the course of several meetings he ultimately agreed to come testify.
While going through the discovery on our cases, Andrew saw a single email to the lead detective that mentioned an incident number from another county. He requested a copy of that incident report and got in touch with this victim. He was a young man who had briefly lived in the same apartment complex as Love in 2021. During the few months they overlapped, he caught Love watching him through his bedroom window multiple times. Eventually Andrew brought him in from Houston to testify.
Then there was Love’s former coworker who had spent several months in 2022 making police reports because he was convinced someone was regularly lurking outside his family’s home. Police were not able to confirm those suspicions until Love’s phone was extracted. A Frisco detective was combing through the extraction and found videos of someone getting out of the shower; they had been filmed through window blinds. The location data associated with those videos put them at this victim’s house in Duncanville, so Frisco PD alerted Duncanville PD. When Duncanville officers told this victim about the videos, he said he had previously worked with Love and Love had seemed to be fixated on him.
Remember when the officers investigating our offenses had been told by a neighbor that fingerprints were lifted from their son’s window on a previous occasion, and they had been told those came back to Love? Andrew had the neighbor and his son come in to give us the details of what happened at their house, which included Love trying but failing to break into the place on multiple occasions. The father came to testify at trial.
The remaining three victims were all neighbors in University Park. Realizing how prolific Love was, Frisco PD had sent out a BOLO (“be on the lookout’) to agencies in surrounding jurisdictions. A detective with the University Park Police Department thought the pictures and information might be associated with three reports his agency had received on the same night in May 2021. The first was a woman who had fallen asleep on her couch, only to wake up when Love walked in her back door. She screamed at him, and he ran away. Second was a woman who decided to check her security cameras after she heard about a lock being broken off a neighbor’s gate. She saw Love sneaking around her backyard in the middle of the night, looking in windows and trying to open doors before leaving because he couldn’t find a way inside. The third woman woke up when her son started screaming there was a man in his room. Her son, who lives on the third floor of the home, told her that he woke up to find a man standing at the foot of his bed. She thought it was a bad dream and checked their security cameras to prove to him that no one had come in or out. Instead, she saw Love going into and out of her home not once but twice. The Frisco detective who had performed the extraction dug through thousands of lines of location data to confirm that Love had been at all three houses that night. All three women came to testify.
These victims were not the end of our punishment case, either. Multiple images and videos of child pornography and age-difficult images were found on Love’s cloud storage account, and a selection of these were presented to the judge. Andrew also reached out to the probation officer and sex offender treatment provider from Love’s prior charges. The former testified about his probation violations, which had resulted in a then-pending petition to adjudicate. The latter told the judge all the reasons Love had been kicked out of treatment, not once but twice, and that Love was the reason she changed the way she ran her practice after more than 20 years in the business. Her experience with Love made her more critical of her clients and caused her to institute a zero tolerance policy for those who continued to be around children.
We even had punishment evidence being generated while we were in trial. On the first day of the punishment phase, we made it about halfway through our case before breaking for the day. That evening, Love was caught masturbating in a common area of the jail while his boyfriend showed him pornography during a video visit, which are all recorded. We quickly contacted the representative of the service provider for the video visits in our jail. He came to present the recording first thing in the morning.
Important lessons
Needless to say, this was the kind of punishment case prosecutors dream of. An overwhelming amount of evidence proved that Love was guilty, but we had even more for punishment. However, I haven’t given this expansive recitation of our evidence as some sort of victory lap, but rather to highlight a couple of things I took away from this case. Both are fundamental, elementary even, but the way this case played out really brought home their importance to me.
The first is that it is exceedingly worthwhile to follow all the little threads in a case to see what is at the other end. This, at first, seems almost like a truism. We always talk about the need to “attack your cases,” how they’ll either get better or worse when you do, and how both of those are good things in the end. This was by no means a new concept to me going into this trial, but the number of threads there were to follow, the amount of time spent following each one, and the extent to which each one paid off, bordered on surreal. It was the type of experience that takes something you have been taught from mere knowledge to actual belief.
Each incident came with its own menagerie of evidence. Dozens of pictures and videos, hundreds of pages of reports, and multiple types of forensics that all overlapped with and connected to each other. Associated with all of these were upwards of 50 officers and detectives from various agencies and multiple individuals and families who had been affected. We spent hours going through evidence, learning and re-learning the forensics, and meeting with witnesses. While this was a long and tedious process, the case got better every time we came back to it. As the case was worked over and over, new connections were made, another helpful piece of information emerged, or another witness came out of the woodwork. Obviously, working the process doesn’t always play out this way, with gain after gain and no previously hidden issues popping up, but the fact that it did work that way here underscored the value of putting in the time to work the process in all our cases. In a way, this case became a sort of exception that proves the rule.
The second lesson is the value of letting young prosecutors take on important roles. Having only been a felony prosecutor for a handful of years, I still consider myself a young prosecutor, but this was my No. 2’s first felony lead. Before this trial, Andrew had never given an opening statement, directed an officer, directed a victim, or given a closing argument in a felony case. He was also presenting DNA, presenting fingerprints, and putting on a punishment case for the first time. While I took on all the digital forensics, he had to learn them well enough to argue them effectively to a jury. All these things come with their own learning curves to one degree or another, and doing all of them in the same case had to have seemed like a monumental task, but Andrew was eager to do as much as I would let him.
I don’t know that I ever mentioned it to him, but I was very hesitant to let him take on so much at once. Every time we sat down to talk about who would be doing what, I got a little more nervous about handing off something else to him. On the one hand, I didn’t want to overwhelm him. On the other, I wanted him to gain as much experience from this case as he could. I made sure that I was there alongside him to prep each witness, sift through each piece of evidence, and learn about each forensic discipline, and there was plenty of time spent on my own making sure all of it was handled correctly, but it would ultimately be a brand-new felony prosecutor putting it all on in front of the jury.
In the end, it resulted in a guilty verdict and a life sentence. It had paid off. Part of that had to do with the wealth of evidence we had to work with in both phases of trial, to be sure, but it was also because of the time Andrew spent learning each part of the case and how they fit together. This again shows the value of working the process, but I include it here because of what it means for him going forward. The next time he handles a victim (or 10) in one of his trials, he’s done that before. The next time he works with DNA, fingerprints, or digital forensics, he’s done that before. The next time he has a case with a lot of moving parts, where more and more keeps getting added to the mix to be absorbed and collated, he’s done that before. That’s not to say either of us have arrived, but being trusted with so much, putting in the required work, and seeing it play out the way it did will allow him to carry a degree of confidence into future cases. Assuming that the experience can be internalized and applied going forward, it has started him on the road to expertise. All of this within the span of his very first lead. In some ways it very much felt like a gamble to let him take on so much, but if this is the result, then we have both won big.
Conclusion
More than being a win for us as prosecutors, it was a win for all officers at the agencies who spent so much time putting their cases together against this defendant. It was a win for all of the families and children whom Love victimized. At the end of the trial, everyone involved could look back at what had happened, at the roles that they had played, and know that justice had been done.