Whenever I see one of these "crazy ways criminals give themselves away" stories I'm now thinking I'm probably looking at a parallel construction.

During the Floyd protests a woman was recorded on camera in Chicago destroying a police car. A week or so later the police arrested her and claimed an improbable series of gumshoeing around the tee-shirt she had on, figuring out where it was purchased and subpoena sales records then doing a lot of cross referencing.

Far more plausible to me is they pulled cellphone location data.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction