A Florida mom was arrested this week and charged with trying to hire a hitman to kill her 3-year-old son.
Arrest documents say that Jazmin Paez, 18, used the parody website rentahitman.com to request the murder, WTVJ reported. The website owner, Robert Innes, told the station he receives multiple such requests a day but found Paez’s request to be very specific. Paez reportedly sent photographs of the child and specific locations of where he would be, prompting him to call police.
“The ability to research names and addresses and verify the intended target lived in a particular address. That to me is a red flag. If that information is corroborated, to me that is something that needs to be looked at and that’s why I referred it, “ said Innes.
WFOR reported that Paez contacted the website on Tuesday and wanted her son killed by Thursday. Investigators traced the IP address of the computer used to make the request and then went to the physical address associate with it and spoke with the child’s grandmother, who identified the toddler.
Detectives posed as a hired hitman and communicated with Paez, who agreed to pay $3,000 for the murder.
Paez was arrested on Tuesday and charged with soliciting murder and unlawful use of a communications device, WTVJ said. A judge gave her a $15,000 bond and ordered her to have no contact with the toddler, who is safe with relatives, the family said.
Nothing but its ridiculousness indicates that rentahitman.com, which was once the site for a cybersecurity company, is a parody site. The site sells “field operative” merchandise and features forms for requesting “services.” But the site has helped law enforcement nail very real attempts to have someone killed.
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[Featured image: Jazmin Paez/Miami-Dade Corrections]