Suspect is hatless. Repeat, hatless.
Describing a person that you just witnessed commit a crime is extremely difficult and it only gets more difficult time as passes and you get artists involved. I was the victim of an attempted armed robbery outside of my apartment building in 1999. I have no idea why but my instinct was to fight back which I did and won at least well enough to escape relatively unscathed. I was locked safely in my apartment talking to 911 not 2 minutes later. My descriptions were fairly good because I had just been in a physical altercation with them. I described, height, age, skin tone and dress style well enough that the Boston Gang Squad knew exactly who they were looking for. They were two upstanding young men who had just gotten out of prison for a series of violent crimes and were fully expected to re-offend and did not disappoint in the ensuing crime spree that night after they tried to target me. The Gang Squad arrested them a few hours later and picked me up to go to the station at 3am to do a photo lineup while they were in holding cells.
Even though I had just described them well overall just a few hours before, even recognizing their faces (that is all that is shown in a photo lineup) was extremely difficult. I agonized over that lineup for about 45 minutes and had to resort to clues like the fact that I injured one of them in the face and the swelling around the eye area was apparent even in the photo. I got both of them right and they eventually went back to maximum security prison for another tour of duty but it wasn’t easy. There is no way I could have described facial features well enough to create a good sketch. Even recognizing them from photos taken shortly before was hard enough when they were shuffled in with lots of others.
For years we had a picture hanging up in the office that was put out by the state police. It was a sketch of a suspect wearing a ski mask. It was ridiculous.
I recently asked a friend if he knew a guy, but I couldn’t remember the guy’s name. I described him as, “a white guy, our age, maybe 25 pounds overweight, kinda skeevy looking”.
And my buddy’s first guess was correct.
Here’s a stunning example (but then again not really):
Waldo Rapist looks JUST LIKE the reporter - YouTube (Youtube)
Yeah, I was watching the evening news once, and the description of the wanted man was something like “Hispanic male with black hair and brown eyes, between 5’4” and 5’10", and between 20 and 50 years of age."
Like that narrows it down at all; basically they just said “it’s a non-elderly Hispanic man”.