It’s been a while since I’ve covered a criminal case involving eDiscovery, but in this one, a Google search and Apple watch data may help exonerate a suspect.

According to People, defense attorneys filed a “bombshell” motion last week that they claim refutes a case against a Massachusetts college professor who was indicted last June, accused of leaving her police officer boyfriend to die in the snow after fatally striking him with her car.

Karen Read has been charged with second-degree murder, motor vehicle manslaughter and leaving the scene of a collision in the January 2022 death of her off-duty Boston Police Officer boyfriend John O’Keefe outside a Canton, Mass., home owned by fellow police officer Brian Albert.

Leading up to his death, the couple of two years reportedly spent the night drinking and bar hopping with friends before Read, 43, dropped O’Keefe, 46, off at the home of a fellow off-duty police officer for an after-party, PEOPLE previously reported.

Prosecutors say as O’Keefe exited the vehicle, Read allegedly proceeded to make a three-point turn during a winter storm, striking her boyfriend in the process before driving off.

After O’Keefe failed to return home hours later, Read allegedly went looking for him, before finding his body in a snowbank outside the home where she allegedly left him.

The defense said Jennifer McCabe, Albert’s sister-in-law described as “the government’s seminal witness”, Googled “hos [sic] long to die in cold” after 2 a.m. that Jan. 29. The defense said that McCabe meant to Google “how” not “hos.” Read’s lawyers also said that McCabe tried to delete evidence of her contact with Albert.

According to Law & Crime, the defense believes that, if approved, the summons will “undoubtedly reveal text messages and calls that Ms. McCabe deleted from her phone in an effort to interfere with the investigation.” Read’s lawyers added that the available evidence “incontrovertibly establishes” that O’Keefe, Read, Albert, Albert’s wife, and McCabe, among others, drank with each other at the Waterfall Bar and Grille in Canton on the night before the cop’s death.

The lawyers argued that O’Keefe’s Apple Health app data helps prove their request is no “fishing expedition.”

“O’Keefe’s arrival at the Albert Residence at 12:20 a.m., between 12:21 a.m. and 12:24 a.m., Apple Health recorded O’Keefe taking 80 steps (i.e., traveling approximately 200 feet or 60 meters) and climbing the equivalent of three floors with his location data pinging at or near the Albert residence,” the motion continued. “The only reasonable interpretation of O’Keefe’s Apple Health Data, which shows an elevation gain of three floors at or near the Albert Residence, is that he made it inside the Albert’s three-floor residence.”

“Thus, location data from O’Keefe’s cell phone directly contradicts Brian Albert’s assertion to police that O’Keefe never entered his home or arrived at the party on January 29, 2022,” the defense added.

The defense also claims “photographs of O’Keefe suggest that he was beaten severely and left for dead, having sustained blunt force injuries to both sides of his face as well as to the back of his head” and “also suffered a cluster of deep scratches and puncture wounds to his right upper arm and forearm… consistent with bite marks and/or claw marks from an animal, more specifically a dog.”

Examples like this case, with a Google search and Apple watch data possibly proving significant in exonerating the suspect and identifying another show yet another example of how eDiscovery evidence is so important in criminal cases today, including cases that are literally “ripped from the headlines”!

So, what do you think about the possibility that a Google search and Apple watch data may exonerate one suspect and identify another one? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

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