Digital Forensics Dispatch

FBI Conducts Mobile Forensic Examination in Murder Case Looking for Motive

April 1, 2021

Thomas Brewster from Forbes recently published an article about an examination of a murder suspect’s phone where the FBI is looking into the suspect’s motive for the crime. In January police responded to a stabbing call in the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation, AZ. The call was placed by a woman who stated that her grandmother had been stabbed by her brother. When the police arrived, they found that the suspect was covered in blood and found an elderly woman with multiple puncture wounds on her body.

The interview with the suspect by FBI agents returned very little motive for why the suspect had snapped and killed his grandmother. The FBI then turned to the suspect’s Apple iPhone to conduct an examination of that device in hopes of finding correlating evidence, as well as to look for intent and motive for the crime. Brewster writes “Though it’s common for the FBI to look for incriminating evidence of mens rea when looking though suspect’s electronic devices, it’s rare for the FBI to explicitly state it is looking for signs of sanity from the search of a phone.”

There has not been any update as to what the examination of the mobile phone has turned up, but the examination is focusing on data collected from the iPhone that is from the last year. It is also unclear if the FBI made use of mobile forensic tools to unlock or bypass the phone’s PIN or Passcode or if that information was provided to them by the suspect.

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