A man is suing Arizona police for $1.5million after he was arrested and held for a murder he did not commit after Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime

Jorge Molina, 23, of Arizona, was arrested at his job at Macy's and spent six days in jail in December 2018 for the murder of Joseph Knight, 29, in March of that year, who was shot nine times outside his Avondale apartment.

Molina was fired from his job but was later released from jail without charge after prosecutors noted numerous inconsistencies with the location data that had tied him to the killing.

Now he is suing his local police department for arresting him based on faulty Google location data.

Jorge Molina says that since the arrest and six days spent in jail, he has lost his job at Macy's and been unable to find new work because he consistently fails background checks

For months, police had struggled to make progress on the investigation, with only fuzzy surveillance camera footage showing a white Honda with an unreadable license plate at the scene of the crime to go on.

Police then turned to Google to help them crack the case, issuing a warrant for geofence information on all the active accounts in the area at the time of the crime, according to a report from the Phoenix New Times.

The warrant produced four accounts, including Molina's, which Google said had been logged into on a device in the area around the time.

Molina also drove a white Honda, which in combination with the Google data, was enough to convince police that he was the likely suspect.

The case against Molina fell apart quickly and prosecutors declined to bring charges, and last month, Molina filed a $1.5million lawsuit against the city of Avondale and members of its police department over their faulty reliance on Google's data.

The lawsuit charges defamation, gross negligence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, which Molina claims he experience after the arrest.

On December 13, 2018, Molina (pictured above in his mugshot) was arrested and spent six days in jail before the case against him unraveled due to numerous inconsistencies in the data from Google

Police found surveillance footage of the crime, but because of the low quality they weren't able to identify the license plate number of the car used in the murder

He was fired from his job at Macy’s, and has been unable to find new work both because the arrest causes him to fail background checks and because new stories about it prominently feature in Google searches for his name.

Molina’s lawsuit argues the data from Google should not have been used since Google allows multiple people to be simultaneously logged in to one account from multiple devices and locations.

WHAT IS A GEOFENCE WARRANT? A geofence warrant is a type of warrant that police can issue to tech companies demanding location data about their users. A geofence is a specific area that's drawn with GPS coordinates. Tech companies like Google can be compelled to turn over information to law enforcement about specific users who were active within the geofence area. The exact requirements for when and how a geofence warrant can be issued vary from state to state. Advertisement

The suit also argues that the data from Google couldn’t actually identify the owner of the device, nor the phone number or IP address associated with the device.

Molina’s lawyers also found multiple location discrepancies in the Google data from other days, which should have been disqualifying.

On one afternoon, Google’s records showed he was at his mother’s workplace in Scotsdale, while according to his debit card records, he was making a purchase at a Walmart 30 miles away.

‘In other words,’ the suit argues, ‘Google location data merely shows a possible physical location of a device that has been used to log into someone's Google account — without revealing any identifying information of the person who is in possession of that device.'