Photo: Courtesy Coast Guard(2)
Longtime friendsPerry Cohen and Austin Stephanos, both 14, set out from Florida’s Jupiter Inlet on a boating excursion that afternoon and were never seen again.
Crewmembers of the Edda Fjord, a Norwegian freighter, spotted Stephanos’s 19-foot Seacraft capsized and floating in a shipping channel about100 miles off the Bermuda coast last month, nearly nine months after the boys vanished. Before packing the boat into a shipping container now in transit to Florida’s Port Everglades, the crew took a series of photographs, including several that show the boat’s battery switch and ignition key in the off position.
“Plaintiff will continue to suffer irreparable harm if the iPhone is not properly handled as material evidence in a possible maritime crime or homicide,” reads the complaint, which sought unsuccessfully to block the FFWCC’s return of Austin’s iPhone to the Stephanos family.
“If the storm came and capsized the boat, the battery switch and the key would not be in those positions,” Rubin continued. “We want forensic experts in accident reconstruction to look at the boat and tell us what happened. I’m not trying to be an alarmist, but I’m also trying to take it from a scientific approach.”
Still, Guy Bennett Rubin, Cohen’s attorney, is hesitant to offer any speculation on just what story the photographs may tell.
Meanwhile, FFWCC law enforcement spokesperson Robert Klepper confirmed to PEOPLE that Austin’s iPhone has been turned over and is now in the hands of the Stephanos family, despite the lawsuit and motions for emergency injunctions filed against the agency and the Stephanos family with the Palm Beach County Courthouse earlier this week.
“We’re considering our next steps,” Rubin told PEOPLE on Wednesday while heading to meet Cohen and husband, Nicholas Korniloff, Perry’s stepfather.
Earlier Wednesday, Pamela Cohen posted astatement on Facebook, further stating her family’s case for an independent investigation of the iPhone’s contents and defending the decision to take her pleas to a public forum:
“The past 8 and a half months have been the most grueling and life shattering anyone could imagine,” she wrote. “Two beautiful boys went out for a day of fun never to return or be heard from again. As Perry’s mother – I have no choice but to do whatever is humanly possible to obtain any bit of information to what happened to him on that fateful day.”
“Some of you may not agree with our choice to take this into the public forum or to fight to keep the phone with authorities; and that is ok,” she continued. “All I want is the information available, if there is any, pertaining to the fateful day of their disappearance. I am not interested in exploiting the private and personal photos, which may be recovered – this has never been our intention.
source: people.com
