Uncover - S37 E1: The Thing | The Expert Witness

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

The city of Akron, Ohio reels from rising violence and stalled investigations until arrests suddenly begin to happen. A mysterious new AI-powered tool called Cyber Check has arrived. Criminal defense attorney Don Malarcik first encounters the technology when it’s used to implicate his young client in a murder. With no clear explanation of how it works, and no public record of its existence, Don and his team begin digging into Cyber Check, uncovering unsettling questions about whether this powerful new technology is delivering justice—or quietly reshaping it.

What's that noise? I don't know. I get that checked. Quickly. Yeah, good point. Point S, Tires and Auto Service. You think Point S has good deals on tires? Definitely.

What makes you say that? This. Until May 31st, get up to $125 on a prepaid card when you buy four eligible Yokohama tires. Details at point S.ca.ca. Good point. Point S, tires, and auto service. This is a CBC podcast. Cheryl Ross-Back always knew what she wanted.

She wanted a girl. Everybody that I know of my friends have daughters. All of them have daughters. I wanted to be a girl mom. I always wanted to have a girl. Cheryl's worked in the same maternity ward for almost 30 years. So she has witnessed people being gifted her literal dream almost every shift. When she got pregnant for the first time, she thought that she could will a girl into existence.

But when the baby came, it was a boy. A blessing, but a boy. When she got pregnant for the second time, she prayed, she wished, come on, girl, girl, girl. In Christmas 2002, her prayers were answered when not only did she get to have a girl, she had Maya. At first, Cheryl got to dress Maya up in the baby girl outfits that she'd found in the store. But even early on,

it was clear to see that Maya liked to make her own decisions. By the time she hit two, she was bossy. A lot of attitude. Yeah. She bossed around the neighbor kids. Yeah, she had a real strong personality. Cheryl's dream of dutifully brushing and braiding her daughter's hair every day before school,

just wasn't meant to be. By the time she was seven, she was like, no, I just wasn't doing it good. She did her own hair. Maya had big plans for her hair, it turned out. She started dyeing her hair when she was 11. It was always a different color and probably blue was the most common. It's very easy to spot Maya in the school photos, church photos, travel photos. She's the girl with the blue hair.

She was one of those kids whose math homework always had art in the margins. and she drew flowers all over her first car. Whether it was her hair, her vehicle, or her skin, she got her first tattoo at 15. Everything could always be made to be more Maya. Now, Maya was at the worst age to be when COVID hit. Her class was the one that was fully robbed of having a senior year. They didn't get to have a prom.

They didn't get to go have a campus tour of college. But Maya knew that when things opened back up, she wanted to go. So after getting a last-minute scholarship, she made each one of her high school teachers a personalized painting to say goodbye, and she headed to the art program at the University of Akron.

Cheryl and Maya pulled into the parking lot in the minivan, got her dorm room set up, and hugged each other goodbye. And if we pause here, it's easy to see why this kind of farewell makes us cry in movies or insurance commercial. it really has the juice.

Your child is your wish for the world, and when you place them like a delicate piece of origami on the shore of the world as it is, you hope that the waves that launch them are gentler than they were for you. Maya was a strong kid, and was more resilient than the average 18-year-old. Yeah, Cheryl took solace in this thought,

as she pulled away and headed back for home. So Cheryl originally dropped Maya off at the University of Akron in mid-August, and exactly one month later was Cheryl's birthday. Like many birthdays before it, Cheryl was working the night shift at the hospital. But this night, something weird was happening on her phone. We have a ring camera, and at the time, I had it set up, so it would alert me if somebody rang the doorbell. Cheryl had originally installed the ring camera because Maya was a ring camera. was known to sneak boys into the house. But now, Cheryl squinted at her phone screen wondering,

who would possibly ring our doorbell at 5 a.m. And I see this man come in, and I didn't know what, it wasn't somebody I knew. And I'm trying to listen to the cameras, and it's not working. And I have patience that have to take care of. It was, like, kind of a busy night. And something's, like, wrong. I know something's wrong.

And I don't know why. There was no audio, so she could only watch what was happening as this strange man walked into the house and started looking at the family photos on the wall. A man kept staring at the picture, so I knew he didn't know my family, and I was trying to think, what is wrong? And the next thing I know I see my husband coming down this, I could see what was going on, but I couldn't hear.

And then he took my husband away. Cheryl's mind swirled with confusion as she continued on, through the rest of her shift, wondering, was that my husband's friend? Is my husband in some sort of trouble? Something weird was happening. I felt sick, and I'm telling the other two nurses I was working with, something's not right at my house. Somebody came to my house and took my husband away.

I don't know, like, either something's wrong with him or something's wrong with his friend. And then suddenly, a short time after that, Cheryl looked up from what she was doing, and there was her husband. And with him was the man who had ended. entered their house. In the light of the hospital, she could see that he was a police officer. And when her eyes honed in on his badge, she read the word that delivered the worst news

she'd ever received in her life before he even opened his mouth. The officer has got a badge, and it says Akron. Immediately, I knew something very bad happened if they came in person. The officer asked if there was a police. place they could sit down to talk. Preferably like a quiet place. And I keep thinking, okay, this is really bad. Sat down.

The officer sat here. I sat here and he said three sentences. Your daughter was at a party last night. There were shots fired. She did not survive. And I let out the worst scream. There was a house party that spilled onto the street with hundreds of kids. near the university campus.

At some point, bullets tore through the night, and Maya McFetridge, and another party goer, Alex Beasley, were killed. The police talked to dozens of kids who were there, but despite there being hundreds of kids with hundreds of phones making videos, dancing, goofing off, fighting, the police told Cheryl they had nothing. I don't know how there could be that many people

and nobody saw that she was laying, I guess, face down and died all alone amongst other than people. Maya's name was printed up, slid into a file, and placed on top of a stack of unsolved cases on the corner of a desk somewhere at the Akron Police Station. And this stack of cases is where this all begins. In this stack are people young and old, of all backgrounds, taken by senseless gun violence, torn from their loved ones ahead of their time, just like Maya. All of these cases had gone cold.

The city of Akron is being rocked by violence. With no justice for their families. This violence has neighborhoods on edge, and Akron police on overtime. But soon, something unbelievable would start happening. In some of the least hopeful cases, the ones where there were few leads, witnesses, In fact, hardly any evidence to speak of. The police started making arrests. Relief in Akron after police say they arrested a man

and charged him with both murder and a brutal robbery. The suspect accused of killing Akron 18-year-old, Nikita Crawford, was indicted for murder today. The U.S. Marshal Service closed in on a hard case for the city of Akron. More than two years later, today an arrest finally made in connection to the shooting death of a baby in Akron.

The suspect is now in police. Finally, questions are being met with answers. At first, those paying attention didn't know what to make of what was happening. What changed. What changed was simple. Something powerful. Something cutting edge had arrived in Akron. And now crimes with no witnesses had something else.

A thing was watching over Akron, watching over all of us. something that had the potential to change the world. I'm Sam Mullins, and from CBC's Uncover, this is the expert witness. Episode 1, The Thing. So I'm, you know, I'm 57. My kids tell me every day how old I am, and all the things that I do that nobody does anymore. And one of those things is I read the newspaper.

Don Malarsik is a criminal defense attorney in Akron, Ohio. There were lots of Milarsiks that needed a lawyer. There was never a Malarsik who was a lawyer. I'm the first one. Don is trim and has a nice tan in February. And when you spend time with him, you'll notice that he's perpetually in the state of either tying or untying his tie, depending on whether he's just heading to or returning from the courthouse across the street. 30 years into his career, Don Malarsik is a creature of habit.

He still writes all of his motions by hand. He shows up to the office before the sun rises, even during the pandemic, when he seemingly had the entire downtown to himself. And every morning, he's already awake when he hears the familiar thud of the paper boy's toss hitting the front door. I still get the actual newspaper delivered to my mail every morning, and that is my quiet time. Akron is a small city blessed with that rarest of unicorns, a quality local paper. The Akron Beacon Journal has a reputation for punching above its weight with its journalistic rigor. And for Don, flipping through in his breakfast nook, it gives him an idea of what's coming down the pike. And during the first two years of the pandemic, Don could tell that there was a lot coming.

Crime exploded, and we had a lot of murders here. Akron. I usually have one, maybe two murder cases. Coming out of the lockdown, I had 12 murder cases. The whole system was overloaded and nothing was moving through the courts. And we got to get through these cases. So this is where Don was at in late 2022, when one day reading his paper like he always does, flanked by his dogs in his breakfast nook, he caught the first glimpse of the thing that was coming. I remember reading about the Black case. A Derris Black was on trial for the murder of 18-year-old Nakia Crawford. Nakia had been outrunning errands with her grandmother when she was shot at a red light. Her grandmother survived, but didn't see who was in the car that had opened

fire into hers. In the police investigation, they were unable to find a witness to the crime. There's no DNA evidence or fingerprints or surveillance footage that tied a suspect to the shooting. And for a time, the case was collecting dust on that pile where Mayas would end up. But then... I remember reading about the black case and hearing this thing called Cybercheck. The newspaper said, Prosecutors emphasized evidence presented in the case from Cybercheck, a new technology that had somehow seen the suspect at Howard and North streets at the time of the shooting.

There are lots of ways that you can place a person at the scene of a crime, obviously. And Don thought he'd seen them all. But this was new. And then a couple weeks later, another case, the Maddie case, came out. A man was shot eight times in a barbershop chair mid-haircut. And same thing. Another case where it looked like it was going nowhere when suddenly they arrest a guy named Salamadi

who is now being prosecuted using this thing. Cybercheck. I'm like, what is this thing? So I started asking other lawyers in the community in the Summit County area, have you ever heard of this thing, Cybercheck? And nobody else really had. From what Don could tell,

it was a tool that the police didn't even need a warrant to use. meaning they could use it wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted. And that concerned me, right? When you've been a criminal defense attorney for as long as dawn, you become, forgive me, defensive. You become accustomed to the feeling of not just being cornered, but of being outmatched in your cases. It's not a fair fight. It's not even close. It's always the defense versus the whole machinery of the state. local cops, state agencies, prosecutors, the feds, they're all coming at you with every tool at their

disposal. So it makes sense that when there's talk of them bringing yet another weapon to the fight, that Don's first instinct is to whack it out of their hand before they can use it, especially when he read that this mystery tool led to speedy convictions. An Akron Beacon Journal reporter was able to interview one of the jurors. I covered the trial and I knew someone on the jury. Stephanie Worsmith covered the court beat for both murder trials that first used cyber check, the Adaris Black case and the Salamadi case. I've been a reporter here at the Beacon for 26 years.

In the Salamati jury box, Stephanie spotted one of her neighbors. And so that's good because then I can be like, hey, you know, can you talk to me after the trial's over? After the guilty verdict, Stephanie swooped in to ask this neighbor what had happened in the jury room and be like, did that cybercheck evidence make a difference when you guys were deliberating? So she said that cybercheck was key to their conviction in this case. When Don first read about this, it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Not only was this thing already in Akron courtrooms, but it was.

was proving to be powerful enough to flip a jury from not guilty to guilty. Don needed to man his battle station. He needed to get to the office. What's that noise? I don't know. I get that checked. Quickly. Yeah, good point. Point S, tires and auto service. You think Point S has good deals on tires? Definitely. What makes you say that? This. Until May 31st, get up. to $125 on a prepaid card when you buy four eligible Yokohama tires. Details at point S.ca. Good point. Point S, tires, and auto service.

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Come on in here. I can show you around our office real quick. Don Malarsik's office features pop art with images of Muhammad Ali, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and one canvas simply says, Not fucking guilty. But pulling focus from the wall hangings are the floor-to-ceiling windows framing downtown Akron.

The streets struck me as quieter than they should have been, given the size and ambition of the 20th century skyscrapers. But this is a city well past its heyday. If you've ever heard of Akron at all, it's probably because of LeBron James. Hashtag the kid from Akron. Or maybe you know it as Rubber City. Through Dawn's window, you can see a 12-foot broad

statue of a rubber worker. The city of Akron used to be known for its innovation. It was a place where you could witness things no one had seen before. It was the first city to ever use a police car, an electric one, no less. The Goodyear Blimp made its maiden voyage above the city in 1890. And in 1938, Akron hosted the world's first women's mud wrestling event. So it's with all of this in mind that we watch Don at his desk in his office start to call around to try and get a handle on this latest new thing that had shown up in Akron. So I found out who the defense attorneys were on both of those cases.

And I called and said, what is this cyber check thing? And one of the attorneys for the black case called me back and said, yeah, I don't know, man. I'd never seen it before, but it was really powerful. It was really compelling. fact, the jury said, if it wasn't for cyber check, we would have acquitted your client. And my first question was, well, okay, well, who was your expert that you used to kind of combat this forensic technology? The lawyer said, well, I didn't use one. I'm like, what are you talking about? Well, I didn't really know what this technology was, and I thought I could do a good

job cross-examining the expert, but I didn't use one. And then I talked to the second lawyer on the second case and I got the same response. Well, I didn't use an expert. And I said, why? This is the kind of thing that drives Don Malarsik nuts. When he hears about a lawyer choosing to go it alone when their client's life is on the line. To him, it's inexcusable. Dawn's firm has a reputation for its vigor. Fortunately, I've never had a client sentenced to death. And between us, We've had 40, 45 capital murder cases. And you get a record like this, not from being brighter or harder working than other places, but by being more willing to ask for help when you need it.

It's really sad. The number of times I have seen defense attorneys just fail at the basic fundamental tenants of the job. Tenets such as get an expert. It's one of those fundamental flaws. that gets their clients convicted and oftentimes sentenced to death. Does it cost money out of your pocket to get expert witnesses when you need them? No, not a dime. Does it cost you time?

Yes. It costs lots of time. Like it or not, to become a criminal defense lawyer, a lot of these cases begin with you at your desk looking through crime scene photos. They are scenes of violence and pain and death. People ask all the time, you know, how do you do this? How do you represent those guilty people? My answer is always the same. Look, if I do my job and everybody else does their job, the right thing is going to happen.

To stomach these grisly images, you need to have faith. Faith in the system. And Don does have that. And he had it when he was first flipping through the crime scene photos for his client, Javion Rankin. Javion Rankin is a very young man charged with murder, and it was essentially a drug deal that had gone bad. You see the crime scene photos where the individual was shot seven times

in a car at close range, and they're gruesome pictures. But when Don first went to see Javion in jail, any preconceptions he had about him from these photos went out the window. They bring him into the jail, and he's in change, and he's in his jail uniform, and he's just this big, lurpy, tall, skinny dude. And, you know, my wife teaches eighth grade, and he looks like one of her students. I'm like, oh, my God, he's just, you know, 110 pounds soaking wet, probably six foot three. And I'm like, are you Javion?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my first impression was he's just really a kid. This is the reality of defense work. Behind the violence is always just a person. and whether you like them or not or believe them or not, they're vulnerable and they need your help. So that's kind of how I met Javion and why I got passionate for his case. Don was also getting to know the holes in the government's case against Javion,

and it looked like this was going to be a pretty straightforward acquittal. The prosecutor didn't have any witnesses to put my client Javion Rankin in the car at the scene of the murder, so they were struggling. Struggling, that is, until a full 24 months after first arresting Javion, it happened. Lo and behold, one night, about two months before the trial, I get an email, and it's from the prosecutor, and it is a Cybercheck report. Dawn was finally invited to The Dance. Javion Rankin's Cybercheck report is 14 pages, the vast majority of which focuses very, very, little on Javion and the crime he was accused of.

It begins with the glossary of terms. Things like case-ask, data elements, dark web, cyber profile, fuzzy hashing. The report then gives a more detailed overview of the thing, which it calls a platform, saying, CyberTech relies on machine learning and artificial intelligence that scour the internet to make real time and historical connections between pieces. of data. It gets more impenetrable from there. Display metric.

SDK providers. IOCBs, which stands for indicators of criminal behavior. There are cyber assets. Domain name service entries. Reputation authority scores. And correlated cyber offenses. After you carve your way through the language and jargon that seems completely unhuman, you can grasp what the report is really saying.

Basically, I've been watching you. And I saw what you did. After months of wondering what one of these things would look like, it was finally in Don's hands. The first thing I did was I reached out to Greg Kelly. I am the senior director for Digital Forensics for Archer Hall. Do you hear that, young lawyers? The first thing he did was reach out to an expert.

And he basically said, you know, this is a murder case. We need to figure out what this program does, how it does it, what the holes are, and so on. Greg is a digital forensics expert, which basically means that if there's a court case in which a computer or cell phone or any traceable online data is pertinent to a crime, Greg and his team of, it's so hard not to say nerds here. Greg and his team of professionals will be able to identify and preserve that data. Greg spent some time with the report that Cybercheck had spat out, condemning JVion. Rankin, unpacking the technical jargon. What the report would do is first build someone's cyber profile.

A cyber profile. Basically, this is Javion Rankin. This is his phone number, his email addresses. These are the social media sites that he uses and the websites that Rankin's profile is interacting with. That was part one. And then part two was, it would say that that cyber profile was that, was that, identified somehow communicating.

Communicating with something, another device, both when and where a crime occurred. So the report said basically, this person's cyber profile was bouncing off of this nearby Wi-Fi router at the time and place of the crime. And then when it cross-referenced with something called indicators of criminal behavior, it was determined that that cyber profile was likely involved in the crime. crime. And then it went even further than that. It would assign a degree of likelihood. The percentage probability that someone's cyber profile was in a certain place at a certain time. JVion Rankin's intelligence value equals 98.45%. Nothing I've ever seen gives out like some

percentage of an opinion on something like that. How did the report glean any of this information. It says that this is the cyber profile of JVian Rankin, but it does not say how they tied any of this information to Rankin, because the Cybercheck report collected no evidence. It doesn't show its work. So for example, if it found the identity of someone

on a Facebook page, it didn't preserve that Facebook page. It just said, yeah, here's the link. And as we found going through it, we might, you know, we'd click on that link and Facebook page is gone. How could anyone verify any of this information? Well, that's actually where the whole battle started is because we had nothing to check. The black box to me was how do you go from that data to this percentage at the end of the day? Like, how does it build? What happens?

Don rushed down the hallway to get a gut check from his colleague, Noah Munier, who couldn't believe what he was seeing. If this was real, this would be a life. defining technology that would change all law enforcement across the entire world. It would change everything. Like when DNA became real. It was always true. We just couldn't find it, right? Once we found it.

So same thing. It changed all cases. This thing was saying that it knows where we are at all hours. How close we are to each other. It knows our movements, not just online, but in physical space. And not just our movements today. but yesterday, last month, last year, last decade. For as long as there's been an internet,

all of it is considered the footprints of our quote cyber profile. This report was saying that Big Brother is here. The eye of Sauron is watching you. And most concerning of all is that this omniscient beast is available to police without a court order or a warrant. I mean, this would be, it would be done. You know, it would be a changing the world situation. But Don had a different reaction.

I'm like bullshit. This is total bullshit. Don had no way of knowing whether it was BS or not, but he had his gut. And he had Noah. Some people get anxious when the fight's coming, like, I like it. What's the old adage? Like, don't wrestle with a picture.

in the mud because at some point you'll both be covered in mud and you realize at some point the pig likes it. I'm the pig. But unfortunately for Don, this particular pig in this particular moment had all the mud he could handle. We all had so many murder cases because they were just getting stacked up. So I think I had, I don't know, 14 or 15 murders pending. Noah couldn't help. So it became apparent that it was time to throw something to the new kid, the extremely new kid. Seriously, is that kid even old enough to work here? So my name is Marie DeCola, and I am an attorney at the Ohio defense firm in Akron, Ohio. Marie is an attorney now, but at this point, she was just a paralegal, yet to be assigned to a task in the office.

The first assignment he gave me in this office was Cybercheck. When Marie was a teenager, she was obsessed with, uh-oh, true crime podcasts and documentaries, obsessed, so much so that she began to wonder if there was a way to be immersed in this stuff all the time. I really thought about, you know, do I want to be a detective? Do I want to be, you know, what do I want to be where I can be in this field? When she was first hired by Ohio defense firm, Marie would sit at her desk waiting for her chance to shine.

And then opportunity was knocking. Or rather, it was shouting down the hallway. Marie, get in here. I remember I came into Don's office, and he said they're trying to use this thing called cyber check. It's total bullshit. I don't really know how it works. I don't think anyone does, but I just need help and research and whatever. Help and research and whatever?

And I was like, yes, like, okay, this is my chance to get in with Don Malarsik. It was mysterious and murder adjacent and therefore right up her alley. The boss's original. ask was simple enough. What the hell is it? It was just this abstract thing that we were still just trying to figure out what it even was. I was thinking certainly this has been used somewhere and in Ohio because if the Summit County Prosecutor's Office is using it, where did they get it?

There has to be a trail of it somewhere. So Marie got to do her favorite thing. She sat down with her laptop with a mystery to solve. So I started my research using. like LexisNexis and Westlaw, which are legal research platforms, like four attorneys. And I typed in Cybercheck thinking, you know, maybe there'll be a case somewhere in Ohio and there wasn't anything. So I expanded my search. Okay, what about in the United States? And there wasn't anything. Nothing. Anywhere in America. Because there had never been a case that had used Cybercheck.

So that could only mean one of two equally troubling things. Either this thing is being used everywhere, but is being kept under such an unprecedented amount of raps and NDAs and top secret security clearance that it's invisible. Or Akron is the only place this thing exists. And, you know, that's when I took to Google and I was Googling what is cyber check. The parent company seemed to be called Global Intelligence. And also of note, the company appeared to be based not in Silicon Valley or somewhere you would expect. but Canada. Weird. And, you know, trying to find employees that worked there and articles in Canada and anywhere and anything.

There was nothing in Canada either. I remember being frustrated like, dang it. Don had been doing his own research and he'd also failed to find out anything. Could they actually be facing something totally new? So they got into it together. Don and I were Googling, like, what is artificial intelligence? What is AI? What are algorithms? I mean, we're on Wikipedia. We don't know.

I mean, I can't turn on his computer. And we're trying to figure out what an algorithm is. I mean, it's like we are like, we have no idea what we're talking about. It's charming to think of those halcyon days of three years ago when you could Google something like, what is AI? Back when, one, that was a reasonable thing to not know. and two, AI wouldn't be the thing answering your query. This was the moment before.

Picture Don and Marie huddled around the computer screen, laughing to themselves about how out of their depth they were. And then there was Noah, down the hallway, surrounded by mountains of boxes and murder case files. The physical embodiment of the backlog the city was dealing with. every desk of every person in the whole Akron criminal justice pipeline was cluttered. But at the police station, things were starting to move. And the police were contacting people like Cheryl, Maya's mother,

to tell them that good things were about to happen in their loved ones' cases. They apparently paid for expensive AI stuff from Canada to solve this crime. AI is dangerous when it goes unchecked. You can never take AI at face value, ever. That's coming up on this season of Uncover. You've been listening to the expert witness from CBC's Uncover. The series is produced by RAW for CBC. The show was written and hosted by me, Sam Mullins.

Our producer is David Waters. The series was developed and reported by David Waters and Jessica Hatcher. Our editor is Veronica Simmons. Coordinating producer is Emily Canal. Mix by Garrett Tiedeman. At Raw, Deborah Dudgeon is the head of podcasts. The production executive is Letitia Kizza-Souza. Special thanks to Emma Wood and Olivia Bhutan.

Additional audio from 19 News, 3 News, News 5 Cleveland, CBC News, WKYC, WSOCTV, and WBRZ. At CBC, the executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and RIF Nurani is the director of CBC Podcasts. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.