A new report indicates Apple engineers were unable to recover any data from the iPhone belonging to one of the two teen fishermen lost at sea in the Atlantic Ocean last summer.
Blu Stephanos, Austin’s father, said he received a call Tuesday night that the phone couldn’t be restored.
Stephanos’ lawyer, Michael Pike, says his client is “devastated.”
“It’s just a tragic, devastating situation,” Pike said. “I know the families are very disappointed relative to the outcome of not being able to power on the phone.”
Apple had to take the phone apart to run diagnostics, clean and restore components and perform a chemical workup to analyze data. The phone is still in several pieces, Stephanos said.
Austin Stephanos and Perry Cohen, both 14 years old, disappeared on July 24 when their 19-foot boat capsized north of Jupiter, Fla. during a storm. A Norwegian freighter recovered their boat.
Cohen had borrowed Stephanos’ iPhone to communicate with his family the day they disappeared. While the Cohen family wanted the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to treat the phone as evidence in an open missing persons case, the agency instead returned the device to the Stephanos family
Cohen’s family had sued Stephanos’ parents and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to have the phone examined by an impartial third party after the commission released it to the Stephanos family.
Local media reports indicate the device was rusted and badly deteriorated after being submerged in sea water for an extended period of time. Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Gregory Keyser in April ordered the iPhone 6 to be overnighted to Apple, after the iPhone maker agreed to attempt to recover data from the badly damaged device.
