Arash Ghaemi has wondered for 18 years what happened to his mother after she disappeared from a Wheat Ridge motel.
So Ghaemi, an artificial intelligence developer and entrepreneur, turned his profession into his passion.
“What if I can get the case files and run it through AI?” he said of the police investigation into his mother’s disappearance. “Maybe it will show me something and make the connections. If I could build it to solve my mom’s case, I could likely build it to solve other cases.”
Ghaemi launched CrimeOwl, an AI program that searches cold-case files to generate new leads for investigators, last year.
So far, the AI platform is in the hands of a few private investigators who are using it to chase leads on behalf of families searching for missing loved ones. Ghaemi hopes one day the program will have its big break in solving a case, and maybe — just maybe — it will help figure out what happened to his mother, Shaida Ghaemi, when she disappeared in 2007.
Ghaemi, who goes by “Ash,” on Tuesday met with investigators, information-technology staff and commanders at the Wheat Ridge Police Department to show off his AI tool and to ask for an update on his mother’s case.
For now, Wheat Ridge police say CrimeOwl is too unproven to use in the department’s investigations, including Shaida Ghaemi’s disappearance.
And they are tight-lipped about her case.
“We were really happy to meet with Ash. It’s part of our philosophy of relationship policing,” said Alex Rose, a Wheat Ridge police spokesman. “It was a twofold meeting to explain what we could about the case and to give some professional insight on the AI tool so it can become more widespread and of use to agencies across the country.”
‘Still trying to make sense of it’
When Arash Ghaemi was growing up, his mother was almost too good a mother, he said, describing her as “almost overbearing” in taking care of him and his older sister.
But when Arash was 17, his parents divorced, and everything changed.
Shaida Ghaemi became distant from her children. She left home a lot.
“It was weird,” he said. “She went from always needing to be in contact with me and my sister to she could take it or leave it.”
Shaida Ghaemi did not have a permanent home and did not have a job, her son, now 40, said. She traveled between Colorado and Maryland, where her parents lived.
In 2007 — five years after the divorce — she moved into the American Motel in Wheat Ridge with her boyfriend, Jude Peters.
“I am still trying to make sense of it,” he said of the changes in his mother’s behavior.
Arash Ghaemi was a 22-year-old server at a Red Robin restaurant in Highlands Ranch when his grandfather called from Maryland on a September night and told him they were unable to reach his mother. He asked his grandson to call the police.
Shaida Ghaemi, then 44, was last seen on Sept. 9, 2007, by Peters. Drops of her blood were found in their motel room. At the time, Peters told 9News it was menstrual blood and that Ghaemi often left for months at a time.
Wheat Ridge police still consider her disappearance a missing-person case, and there is no “clear indication of foul play,” Rose said. “Jude is not considered a person of interest in this investigation at this time,” Rose said of Peters.
“They still don’t know where she’s at and they don’t have any trace of her,” Ghaemi said.
‘True value’ of AI
Artificial intelligence is gaining ground as a law enforcement tool. Multiple police departments across Colorado are using the technology, most commonly for converting body-worn camera footage into written crime reports. It’s also being used to track license plates and to scan people’s faces.
The Wheat Ridge Police Department uses Axon’s Draft One to help write police reports, based on their body-worn camera footage.
“Our officers know they’re accountable for every single word,” Rose said. “It gives them a who, what, when and where and can save them time, but it’s not a substitution for good police work.”
Ghaemi launched CrimeOwl about six months ago. He is also developing AI programs for the dental industry and a new sports statistics program that could eventually be used by the NBA.
He programmed CrimeOwl to sort through all of the documents in a case file and build a map of the people connected to the missing person, such as partners, family, close friends and neighbors. The AI also creates a timeline of events leading to the disappearance or death and then maps all of the geographic locations connected to the crime, he said.
The platform has a chat function so investigators can ask the AI to sift through files to find answers to their questions.
While CrimeOwl was designed to help with missing-persons cases, Ghaemi said he hopes it can be used to solve other crimes.
No police departments have bought the product so far.
Ghaemi, who lives in Miami, said he tested CrimeOwl on a solved cold case in Florida and, after uploading the police case file into his program, the AI created a list of credible suspects within 30 minutes, he said. Police confirmed it had identified the actual perpetrator, he said.
“It took me 30 minutes to do what it could have taken them weeks or months to do,” Ghaemi said. “That’s the true value here.”
Not ready for police use
CrimeOwl, however, is not ready for active law enforcement investigations, Rose said.
The CrimeOwl platform would need to be secure so no one could tamper with the evidence once it is uploaded, Rose said. It would need to receive various certifications before any law enforcement agency used it, he said.
It would also need to be vetted by lawyers so any leads it generated would hold up at trial, he said.
“There are a lot of details and a lot of hypotheticals that would need to be heavily vetted for AI technology in a real-world police setting,” Rose said.
Still, Wheat Ridge police are intrigued by Ghaemi’s AI tool and were more than willing to offer advice and expertise, he said.
“We’re always going to applaud somebody who is trying to use technology to find ways to help,” Rose said.
Ghaemi said the Wheat Ridge investigators declined to hand over his mother’s case file because of the security concerns. He had wanted to upload those documents into CrimeOwl to see if it could generate new leads.
Police officials also told him that if they used CrimeOwl to identify a suspect, that person’s defense attorney would likely argue bias since the AI platform was built by the missing woman’s son, Ghaemi said.
“My stance is it has been 18 years. You guys have passed it on to other investigators. It’s not solving the case,” he said. “I’m willing to take that risk.”
Ghaemi hopes to overcome the legal barriers and law enforcement skepticism before his new company folds under financial pressure. He said CrimeOwl has a revenue stream, but it loses money every month.
“I built this thing with a mission in mind at first,” he said. “I didn’t really know how it would work or if it would work or if I would go broke. Even if it’s not me and CrimeOwl went broke tomorrow and we had to shutter the doors, I just want investigators to use AI to solve these cold cases.”
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