In November 2003, Charles McCoy Jr. terrorized the citizens of Columbus, Ohio by firing randomly at drivers and buildings from I-270 killing one person and wounded several others. Investigators had nothing to go on, no suspects or evidence because no one knew exactly who was doing the shooting or where he was shooting from.

FBI Special Agent Ron Chavarro came up with a revolutionary idea after hearing of the ShotSpotter program. ShotSpotter was a new program that located and tracked something called gunfire acoustics triangulation; simply said it locates the sound a gun makes when fired and narrows down the exact location.

Employing the use of microphones, whose sounds were routed through a central computer system, police where able to locate where the shots had been fired and collect forensic evidence. Evidence that was later used to convict McCoy in March 2004.

ShotSpotter was brought to Washington by Chavarro and in 2005 the FBI partnered with the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, since then it has been used several times in order to solve many cases. Word spread fast and now the ShotSpotter is located in over a dozen U.S. cities.

One day the ShotSpotter program could be just as common as some of the other high-tech ways in which law enforcement officers keep us safe. Law enforcement officers who would like to work with Chavarro can contact the Washington Field Office at http://washingtondc.fbi.gov/contact.htm