Facebook Post Leads To Arrest Of Fugitive In Kimball

A Wyoming man wanted for felony warrants in Laramie County, Wyoming was arrested here in Kimball last week.

Matthew Michael Huelsman, 37, wanted on three felony warrants for stalking, one for burglary, and a misdemeanor for a probation violation with an original charge of battery, and a second warrant violation for a protection order, was taken into custody by Sergeant Brandon Loy of the Kimball County Sheriff’s Office.

Huelsman was considered dangerous.

Surprisingly, the arrest stemmed from a Facebook post by Laramie County law enforcement that contained Huelsman’s picture and a list of the charges against him, according to Loy who was tipped off by a concerned citizen who had spotted Huelsman in town.

“That morning, he had seen his pictures on Facebook. He saw him at the gas station here. He called up. He gave me the information. I tracked down where he had gone to, made contact with him, ran his information, identified him to be who he was, and arrested him,” Loy said.

Sergeant Loy arrested Huelsman at Schadegg Motors where Huelsman had worked since January of this year.

No one seemed to be more shocked by the arrest than Mike Schadegg.

“It surprised me. They came in and asked if we had a new guy working for us. I thought he was talking about Roger, but he was talking about Matt,” Schadegg recalled.

“They went in the office and verified it and then they arrested him. It came as a huge shock. We run records tests when we pre-hire, and he came up clean then,” Schadegg added.

People in town who encountered Huelsman considered him pleasant.

Though the use of Facebook and other social media as a way to track down wanted persons seems unconventional, the practice is more common and yields greater results than one might think, according to Sergeant Loy.

Twitter and Facebook posts have led to several high profile arrests, while the use of cell phone cameras and video recordings increasingly end up as evidence, as well as in media reports of incidents.

“It happens more often than people realize. Social networking has actually made our stuff on warrants a lot easier, because the information is all out there. If you post you have a warrant for someone, it gets to a ton of people,” Loy said.

According to Sergeant Loy, even Huelsman himself couldn’t believe the method by which he had been caught.

“He asked me how we had tracked him down, and when I told him that it had been from a post on Facebook, he was dumbfounded. He couldn’t believe it,” Loy said.

Huelsman has been extradited back to Laramie County where he remains in the custody of the local law enforcement agencies in that city.