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> you recognize that all you need to do is to rub it on some concrete for a couple of minutes to completely destroy it right

You're going to take time away from your actual escape to make yourself less incriminating in case you are caught? Should he have been grinding up IDs at the Greyhound bus terminal in New York? Right after the whole city heard about the shooting? Or should he have waited until after the FBI plastered the nation with his face?

> if you owned a pair of scissors or a lighter or something

Scissors won't take care of fingerprints, let alone DNA. As for the lighter, again, where do you propose he do this without attracting attention?

Actually, I could see him having thought this would be easy to do, maybe even packing a lighter and scissors, only to realise in execution that you can't start burning IDs on a bus without someone noticing.




Respectfully, none of what you’re describing is real life. Police don’t go around fingerprinting random pieces of plastic.

You can just deface it in any way and throw it out the window on a highway or into any trash can and it will quite literally never be found.


> Police don’t go around fingerprinting random pieces of plastic

No. But you don't know how far behind they are when you dispose of it. It only becomes random plastic after they've lost your trail.

> can just deface it in any way and throw it out the window on a highway or into any trash can

Sure. Or you can keep it until it can be safely disposed of. Which carries fewer risks? We don't even have to hypothesise, we know for a fact that the IDs on his person didn't cause him to get caught. We also know him not having the IDs on him wouldn't have caused him to be less caught.


I would think that getting rid of the evidence is the integral part of planning a crime. Otherwise it is sloppiness. There is a lot of ways to do such things I am sure, but you have to thought it through before. He didn't or the adrenaline was too much for him.


He had four days to come up with a way to get rid of a few pieces of plastic.

Now I'm not a valedictorian, but I'd like to think I could achieve that.




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