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INDIALANTIC, Fla. — A newly filed Palm Bay Police Department search warrant affidavit served on Snap Inc. is providing the clearest picture yet of how 19-year-old Lucas Sander Jones came to know 28-year-old registered sex offender Colie Lee Daniel in the days leading up to Daniel’s baseball-bat killing and dismemberment.
The 11-page affidavit, filed April 27, 2026, seeks the contents of a Snapchat account under the username tarpon88, registered to phone number 321-213-7462, and covers communications and stored content from 3 p.m. on March 7, 2026, through just before noon on March 21, 2026, the window investigators believe captures the entire arc of the relationship between the two men, from first contact to the day after Daniel was killed.
According to the affidavit, the digital trail begins on March 6, 2026, at 4:51 p.m., when Daniel sent Jones an iMessage that read: “Still don’t have daddy’s address.” In the same thread, Daniel told Jones he had “got rid of the AirTag.” Roughly an hour later, Jones asked to see Daniel.
The two continued trying to coordinate a meeting through the morning of March 7. At 5:04 a.m., Jones asked Daniel if he wanted to do something that morning. Daniel declined, saying he was at work. At 7:06 a.m., Jones asked again, suggesting they could meet later in the evening. Daniel replied, “maybe.”
At 3:47 p.m. on March 7, Jones asked Daniel for his Snapchat username. Daniel replied with “tarpon 88.”
After that single exchange, the iMessage thread between Daniel and Jones effectively ends. The affidavit states that the two “no longer appear to communicate through iMessage” once Daniel handed over his Snapchat handle — meaning every message that followed, across the next two weeks, took place on a platform engineered to make messages disappear.
Snapchat’s defining feature is that messages and images delete themselves after they are viewed. But on March 10, 2026, three days after handing over his Snapchat username, Daniel screenshotted a graphic image Jones had sent him and texted it to a friend named Andrew at 4:19 p.m.
The screenshot, preserved on Daniel’s iPad and now part of the probable cause record, shows what investigators describe as a photograph of a penis. The watermark on the Snapchat interface identifies the sender as “Lucas 19” the contact name Daniel had saved Jones under with a timestamp of “9 min ago.”
Detectives compared the background of the photograph to crime scene images taken inside Jones’ bedroom when the search warrant was executed and concluded that the image had been taken in Jones’ room. The matching grey dresser and blue-grey gaming chair visible in the Snapchat photograph appear in the search warrant photographs documented by Palm Bay Police.
The text exchange between Daniel and Wolbert, as quoted in the affidavit, captured Daniel’s reaction in real time:
Daniel: “Still don’t have daddy’s address”
Wolbert: “Have u talk to him”
Daniel: “9 hours ago”
Daniel: *sends the screenshot*
Daniel: “This is 19 dick he sent on snap.”
Wolbert: “Damn”
Wolbert: “I what (want) that”
Daniel: “That’s why I don’t want to block him”
Wolbert: “I might need to message hi and come visit”
Daniel: “lol”
Wolbert: “Get us a room 3 of us”
The exchange establishes that the two men had been communicating directly through Snapchat for at least nine hours by the morning of March 10, that Daniel was actively engaging with Jones’ messages rather than blocking them, and that the two were on intimate enough terms by the second week of March for Jones to send sexually explicit images of himself.
Ten days after that screenshot was sent, on March 20, 2026, neighborhood surveillance cameras captured Daniel entering the residence at 420 Watson Drive in Indialantic at 5:32 p.m. He was never seen alive again.
At approximately 9:45 p.m. that night, Daniel’s parents arrived at the home looking for him after his location services pinged at the Watson Drive address. Jones came to the door and confirmed Daniel was inside but refused to allow the parents in. Jones called Indialantic Police Department himself, asking officers to mediate the standoff. Daniel’s parents and the responding officers eventually left without ever seeing or speaking with their son. Daniel’s vehicle remained parked on the street.
The next morning, March 21, Indialantic officers returned to the home for a welfare check. Jones told them Daniel had “left out of the back door” the night before. A sweep of the residence turned up nothing, but Daniel’s vehicle was still parked outside.
Daniel’s parents formally reported him missing on March 22 after being unable to reach him for several days. He had also missed work, which the affidavit notes was “highly unlike him.”
On the morning of March 28, 2026, at approximately 10:50 a.m., officers responded to the area of J A Bombardier Boulevard SW on the edge of the Compound in reference to a suspicious suitcase. The contents were confirmed by Medical Examiner Investigator Reynolds to be human remains. An Amazon box addressed to Lucas Jones was found alongside the suitcase.
That night, a residential search warrant was executed at 420 Watson Drive and a vehicle search warrant on a red Honda registered to Jones’ girlfriend, Mishai Burrows. Human blood evidence was located in both the residence and the vehicle. Jones’ cell phone was seized.
Jones was arrested on March 29 on charges of tampering with evidence, abuse of a dead human body, and improper disposal of human remains. The remains were positively identified as Daniel through fingerprints on March 31. The Medical Examiner’s autopsy that morning ruled the manner of death homicide and confirmed the body had been dismembered. Parts of the remains have still not been recovered.
On April 1, after Burrows gave a sworn statement alerting investigators to evidence the first search had missed, a second residential search warrant was served at the home. The State Attorney’s Office upgraded the case to second-degree “depraved mind” murder, and Jones was taken into custody on the murder charge that morning.
Detective Rae’s affidavit lays out why investigators believe the Snapchat account holds evidence material to the murder prosecution. The CelleBrite extraction of Jones’ phone confirmed his only known Snapchat username is “lucas.jones006.” Daniel’s account, “tarpon88,” sat on a different device and a different platform and because Snapchat is engineered around message destruction, the only way to recover what passed between the two men in the 13 days between Daniel sending Jones his username and Daniel walking through Jones’ front door is to compel Snap Inc. to produce its server-side records.
The warrant directs Snap to turn over all stored communications, Memories cloud-storage content, IP and connection logs, subscriber identification records, billing records, and any associated devices linked to the tarpon88 account between 3 p.m. on March 7 and 11:59 a.m. on March 21, 2026. The affidavit also requests a non-disclosure order preventing Snap from notifying the account holder a routine but legally significant request given that Daniel, the account holder, is deceased.
The earlier probable cause affidavit charging Jones with second-degree murder framed the killing as a self-styled vigilante act tied to Daniel’s status as a registered sex offender, with Jones telling Burrows he had killed Daniel because of that status. Detective Rae’s search warrant adds a new layer to that narrative: by the time Jones swung the bat, the two men had spent two weeks in an apparently flirtatious, sexually charged Snapchat exchange that began the moment Jones asked Daniel for his username and ended only when Daniel walked into the Watson Drive residence on March 20.
That timeline is significant for both sides. For prosecutors, it tightens the “planned prior acts and made preparations” language already in the original probable cause affidavit, suggesting Jones cultivated contact with Daniel for nearly two weeks before luring him to the home. For the defense, the existence of an ongoing intimate digital exchange complicates any account that frames the killing as a spontaneous reaction to Daniel’s sex offender status, while also raising questions about how that contact was initiated and what was said in messages now sitting on Snap Inc. servers in Santa Monica.
Daniel was convicted in 2017 of Lewd or Lascivious Battery after molesting a 12-year-old boy in Indialantic. He was 19 at the time of that offense, the same age Jones is now.
Jones remains in custody at the Brevard County Jail on no bond on the murder charge. Palm Bay Police, the Brevard County Medical Examiner’s Office, and the State Attorney’s Office for the 18th Judicial Circuit continue to investigate. Detective Rae’s digital forensic analyst, Detective Danti, is still working to repair Daniel’s phone, which was destroyed and recovered with his remains in the suitcase.
The Space Coast Rocket will continue to follow developments in the case as Snap Inc. records are returned and additional charging decisions are made.
The charges against Lucas Sander Jones are accusations only. He is presumed innocent until and unless proven guilty in a court of law.
