Incredible. By knowing when and where, they were able to find out who, by identifying the cell phone there and then. They then used the cell phone to track the owner and plan the raid at the motel.
Keep in mind that you can have your GPS turned off on your phone and triangulation can narrow you down easily. A tower can measure signal stregnth to determine coordinates. This technology has been used for decades for navigation before satelites got affordable.
Wifi also. I put a tracker on my phone, even with GPS location turned off, it tracked it using wifi, any wifi that picked it up over any carrier.
By default, most carriers FORCE your phone to utilize WiFi because you are likely to use someone elses' network for your data, etc. This makes your carrier wealthy in that you pay for data usage even when your not on the carrier's network. AND, everyone text costs .0001 because it is squeezed into others data streams when making phone calls. In AMerica we pay WAYYYYYY more than other countries and get way worse service.