A Miami-based entrepreneur is making a very 2020s plea to Wheat Ridge police: let artificial intelligence take a crack at his mother’s 18-year-old disappearance. The system, called CrimeOwl, is built to chew through massive, digitized case files and surface timelines, relationship maps, and geographic patterns that its creator says can spotlight leads detectives might have missed. He recently demonstrated the software to Wheat Ridge officers using test cases and says it turned up what looked like promising threads.
Arash (“Ash”) Ghaemi sat down with investigators, IT staff, and command staff in Wheat Ridge to walk them through how CrimeOwl works, but officials ultimately told him the tool is still too unproven for formal use and declined to release his mother’s case file, according to The Denver Post. One law enforcement leader described the session as relationship policing, essentially a chance for both sides to see what the tech can do, while the department raised concerns about security and evidentiary standards.
Shaida Ghaemi was last seen on Sept. 9, 2007, at a motel along the I-70 frontage road in Wheat Ridge, and investigators later found drops of her blood inside the room, according to the Charley Project. Her family has said it was completely out of character for her to vanish without any contact with her children, and the case has lingered unresolved for nearly two decades.
How CrimeOwl Works
The company bills CrimeOwl as an “Investigator OS” that ingests PDFs, photos, audio, and video, then automatically pulls out names, places, and other entities, builds timelines, maps relationships, and ranks potential leads for human investigators to review. That public description highlights speed and organization, turning boxes of cold-case paperwork into searchable timelines and people-maps that detectives can move through more quickly, per CrimeOwl.
The Pitch And The Test
Ghaemi has been shopping the platform to private investigators as well as law enforcement agencies, and reporters say investigators who have tried it have seen the system generate prioritized suspect lists and pattern matches that helped them move faster through dense files, according to The Colorado Sun. The product also includes an optional public-facing portal that lets families share some case details and collect tips while keeping sensitive material shielded from general access…