FBI cannot access gunman’s phone
UNITED STATES: The FBI has been unable to access the phone of the Texas church gunman, and officials have voiced their frustration with the tech industry as they try to gather evidence about Devin Kelley’s motive for killing 26 churchgoers in a small town outside San Antonio.
‘‘With the advance of the technology and the phones and the encryptions, law enforcement – whether that’s at the state, local or federal level – is increasingly not able to get into these phones,’’ Christopher Combs, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Antonio bureau, said yesterday.
Combs declined to say what type of phone Kelley had, ‘‘because I don’t want to tell every bad guy out there what phone to buy’’.
The revelation came as investigators continued to scour the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, where Kelley left behind 15 empty 30-round ammunition magazines after his attack on Monday.
The FBI’s refusal to identify the manufacturer of the phone stands in contrast to its public feud with Apple in the aftermath of the San Bernardino, California shooting in
2015 that left 14 people dead. In that case, investigators wanted access to gunman Syed Farook’s iPhone
5C, hoping the device would provide information about possible accomplices or terror networks.
Apple defied a court order to help crack the phone’s pass code, arguing it would set a precedent that would compromise the security of billions of customers. The FBI eventually paid a private firm
US$1 million to circumvent Apple, gaining access to Farook’s phone and dropping its lawsuit against the tech giant.
The tension between law enforcement and the tech industry over encryption remains as high as ever. FBI director Christopher Wray said last month that federal agents were still seeking access to
6900 mobile devices.
Kelley escaped from a mental health facility in 2012 and made death threats to his superiors in the US Air Force, according to newly revealed El Paso, Texas police records.
The Comal County Sheriff’s Office also announced yesterday that Kelley had been accused of sexual assault in 2013, though the case was dropped.
The latest revelations show Kelley had a documented history of erratic behaviour and violence when he was allowed to buy four guns between 2014 and 2017, apparently because of the air force’s failure to report his history of domestic abuse to background-check databases used by gun dealers.
Kelley had previously attended the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs but the pastor ‘‘did not think that he was a good person and did not want him around his church’’, Wilson County Sheriff Joe Tackitt said. ‘‘But he said, ‘How do I run him away from my church?’.’’
The new details about Kelley’s mental health issues came in El Paso police records first obtained by Houston’s KPRC-TV, which were filed after Kelley disappeared from the Peak Behavioral Health Services centre in Santa Teresa, New Mexico on June 13, 2012.
Kelley ‘‘suffered from mental health disorders’’ and had apparently been sent to the facility during his air force court martial proceedings on charges of beating his wife and his stepson in 2011 and 2012, according to the police records.
An incident report described Kelley as ‘‘a danger to himself and others, as he had already been caught sneaking firearms on to Holloman Air Force Base’’ in New Mexico, and that he had concocted a plan to use a bus to escape the mental health facility.
El Paso officers quickly found him and said Kelley ‘‘did not resist or make any comments about harming himself or others to the officers’’.