Haunted by his mother’s disappearance in Wheat Ridge nearly two decades ago, Ash Ghaemi has turned to artificial intelligence to try to help other families find the answers he never got.
He was 22 years old when his mother, Shaida, disappeared from a room at American Motel, just off Interstate 70, without saying goodbye to her two children. After watching the investigation go cold, he developed a software that uses AI to scan thousands of pages of police reports, evidence logs and other files in minutes, a process that could take human detectives weeks or months.
By revealing patterns and revisiting overlooked details, the tool is meant to give investigators a jump-start on long-dormant cases, Ghaemi, now 40, said.
“It basically enables investigators to upload thousands of files, videos, audio, PDFs, text messages in a few clicks — just upload it — and it processes all the files and it creates a dashboard of information which reflects how investigators would work the case, but it does it faster,” he said.
The tool isn’t designed to replace investigators, rather serve as an extra tool to help strapped departments organize large case files in a more efficient and streamlined way, he said.
“AI isn’t a tool to replace anybody. There needs to be humans involved,” Ghaemi said. “AI is not creative, it’s not intuitive. You need human intuition.”
Ghaemi’s quest to get the AI-powered tool into police departments across the country comes as police are increasingly relying on AI tools in Colorado, including Flock Safety’s license plate readers and Draft One, which creates the first draft of police reports, aiming to make the process faster and easier.
Supporters of AI in policing say it has the potential to transform law enforcement by helping agencies analyze evidence, track crime trends and allocate resources more effectively. But civil rights advocates caution that the technology can entrench bias and erode public trust when deployed without transparency or oversight.
Only a fraction of law enforcement agencies — 7% nationwide — have a dedicated cold case unit and only 1 in 5 departments has formal protocols for initiating cold case investigations, the National Institute of Justice found in 2019.
Since launching earlier this year, several private investigators have started to use Ghaemi’s tool, called CrimeOwl, including on cases in Colorado.
When working a cold case, like the 1996 killing of JonBenét Ramsey at her family’s Boulder home, the tool has helped private investigator Jason Jensen organize thousands of digitized files, compare different case reports and spot similarities.
Using the JonBenét Ramsey files he has access to, he asked the platform who it believed was the likely suspect, discounting DNA. It delivered four names, listing them in order of likelihood, next to an explanation, he said.
“It really honed in and identified in its explanation why it thought it was significant, which isn’t uncommon for anybody to do, but it spared me from having to use my brain power and five hours to write it out,” Jensen said. “It suggested it all at a snap of a finger.”
It’s also effective in huge cases, like the Atlanta child murders when a serial killer snatched and killed more than two dozen children between 1979 and 1981, Jensen said. He is also investigating a missing person’s case out of Fremont County, but CrimeOwl hasn’t helped uncover any new leads yet.
By using the tool, investigators can look for common themes or circumstances of someone going missing, he said. For example, who else went missing after midnight? When was there a blue car at the scene?
“That’s what it takes to do cold cases,” said Jensen, co-founder of the national group Cold Case Coalition. “If you don’t have a tip or something in your file, you have to look in other files or in newspaper clippings or some other source to make a comparison to create your own leads.”
“It’s likely going to take investigators years”
Days after his mother disappeared in 2007, police told Ghaemi there was something suspicious about her case and it soon turned into a homicide investigation, Ghaemi said.
“I did all the things that were asked of me. I went on the news, I offered a reward, I stayed in contact with the police unit and then nothing happened for many years,” Ghaemi said. “I checked in every once in a while, but I stopped checking in.”
Frustrated by the lack of answers, he set out to investigate the case himself, but quickly hit a wall when he realized just how long it would take to sift through thousands of documents collected over the years.
“It could take me years,” Ghaemi said. “It’s likely going to take investigators years, as well. And I thought, hey, maybe AI can sort through these files.”
Experts estimate there are more than 250,000 unsolved murders across the nation, a number that grows by about 6,000 each year, according to the nonprofit National Policing Institute, which analyzed FBI data.
Ghaemi, who has a background in tech, worked with a developer to build the system “from the ground up” and said data is secured and encrypted on Microsoft Azure servers.
The platform isn’t accessible by other investigators and doesn’t experience “hallucinations,” when an artificial intelligence system generates false, misleading or nonsensical information that it presents as truth.
“If you’re on ChatGPT or other AI, it’s getting trained on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube and true crime stuff,” Ghaemi said. “(CrimeOwl) only pulls information from those files, so they’re not diluted.”
There’s also a public-facing side of the platform that allows families to raise awareness for missing people, intended to accelerate missing persons cases with crowdsourced tips.
All 87 sworn police officers in Wheat Ridge, where Ghaemi’s mother disappeared, are authorized to use artificial intelligence on a daily basis to help write police reports, similar to many other law enforcement agencies in Colorado, Alex Rose, a spokesperson for the department said. Though not all chose to use it.
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Read more“There are some people who are old school and prefer to kind of write the reports themselves. There are some calls where it’s a good jump-off point, but they would rather kind of do what they’ve been trained to do in their core police work and through the academy, which is, write the report and they know which details are salient,” Rose said.
The department’s sole crime analyst uses AI-powered facial recognition that runs surveillance footage through its system to generate leads on suspects, he said.
“We’re using AI to help us create some of those matches instead of just doing it manually, so it’s saving our crime analyst a tremendous amount of man hours,” Rose said. “But we don’t just take those results and assume that’s probable cause. It’s a lead, it’s not a final result.”
But police aren’t using CrimeOwl to investigate Ghaemi’s mother’s disappearance, and Ghaemi isn’t either. The department hasn’t released any of her case files to him, despite his requests. He said he has a private investigator ready if and when they do.
“I don’t want to be the one looking through those files to be honest with you,” he said. “It’s just emotionally tough for me to put that on the website.”
But Ghaemi still holds on to some hope.
“If they were to find a way to solve all these cases with AI and it wasn’t my tool and they solved my mom’s case, I’d be happy. I took a risk,” Ghaemi said. “But I just wish they would just have a sense of urgency.”