Drive by shooting, caught on Nest, caught by police

Last night someone decided to drive by my house and shoot a few times. This is not a normal occurrence as you pretty much have to want to get caught doing things on my street because the police hang out in a parking lot at the end of it to do paperwork. Judging by the damage or lack evident I’m assuming they were either shooting into the air, the building across the street, or a stop sign.

I was asleep. I was woken up and thought a piece of extruder plastic had fallen off a shelf (long story,) and when I found it fine I checked the kids to make sure it wasn’t the sound of them falling off the bed… nope. Checked the Nest Cam and there was this:

I went outside, this was a few minutes after the shooting and checked to see if they had shot up my car, house, neighbor’s, etc. Nothing evident. My neighbor came out and we talked for a minute and I showed him the video. We checked his house for bullets… I did a cursory look around while on the phone with the police.

Left my info with dispatch and was told I’d be contacted if they needed the video.

Came back in, checked everything again to make sure no bullet magically got in and hit my kiddos. I’ll note I checked them first, but had not thought that someone had been shooting at that point. My oldest was (according to Google Maps,) 59.44 feet/18.11 meters from the position of the last gunshot. It could be more, could be less, I don’t think the audio quite syncs right on these Nest recordings so don’t hold me to the under 60 feet statement.

Nest Cam IQ

I got a text sometime after 1am from my neighbor that the police were in the parking lot across the street. I decided to wander over to see if they needed the video. I’m old, white, chunky, and the head of the neighborhood association (we’ve worked with the South Precinct a few times,) and have been through the Citizen’s Police Academy in Nashville as a part of running for Metro Council… long story, but due to that I went, barefoot across the street and approached at a distance and waved an officer over.

They had a youth, and a car that looked pretty much like you’d expect from the video above. While the gun that was retrieved was not smoking, the barrel was hot I’m told. They found two of the three spent casings in the car and were hoping to find where the third might have ejected so they could rule out that it was some other car, but were not entirely sure where the shots had been fired.

I’m the only person who knew which street shots had even been fired from (the Towers sits between 3 streets and a church parking lot you can drive through).

Well, lucky them, I knew the couple hundred foot stretch that three shots had been fired from. At 1:45:23am an officer finds the third casing on the street. This spent shell was somewhere around 50 feet from my kiddo.

The casing will be taken to the crime lab and put in their little analyzer which had a really cool name but I can’t find my CPA notes today. It’ll either match the gun and the casing or it won’t. It’s basically a casing fingerprinting tool.

So yeah, that’s my Google Nest story for the day.

For the purely conjecture part, I believe the kid was attempting to impress some girls who were there, at 1am, in a retirement center parking lot, and probably was firing into the air or at a stop sign or something, being 16 with a stolen gun, doing stupid stuff without thinking.

On the tech side, the video above was captured using the less expensive Nest Aware service. Not the full time streaming. It triggered, pushed enough of the old video to the cloud, and worked well enough that I could spot the car coming in before the three shots and it driving by my house triggered the audio recording.

So as long as your Nest cam doesn’t get shot before it can dump that buffer, looks like they’ve got it pretty well down on triggering.


Paul E King
