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In deadly mistake, ankle monitor put on man’s fake leg

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WASHINGTON — After Quincy Green was arrested on a gun charge in April, he was supposed to be on house arrest while waiting for his trial. But a tech at the company that supplies and fits ankle bracelets on pre-trial detainees in Washington, DC, put the bracelet on over Green’s sock—that’s “absolutely not” protocol, per an exec at the company, who says regulations require the bracelets to be placed directly on skin—and apparently didn’t realize that sock was covering a prosthetic leg.

So, police say, Green simply took off the leg, replaced it with another one he had, and was able to leave his house. That’s how, they allege, he was able to go to an area that Fox 5 DC reports he had specifically been ordered to stay away from and where he allegedly shot and killed Dana Hamilton around 2:40am on May 19.

“That man was supposed to be in his house,” Hamilton’s mother tells the Washington Post. Authorities haven’t disclosed a possible motive. Hamilton, who lived with his mother, was on disability due to heart problems.

He had told his mother he was going to distribute religious pamphlets, got into a van with some friends, and ended up at an apartment complex in DC where his family had lived decades ago and where his 22-year-old brother had been shot and killed.

Surveillance video shows Green, 44, with two men near that complex, drinking alcohol, on the morning of the shooting, police say, and it allegedly also shows him holding a gun and shooting a few times at a fleeing man.

But, after a witness identified Green as the suspect, police were told the GPS readings from his ankle bracelet showed that he had been home, a mile away, at the time.

After getting a search warrant, they found the bracelet on the prosthetic leg in a box. He has been charged with second-degree murder, the police department says.