TOMS RIVER – Two days after his father was murdered, Mark J. Austin performed a search on his phone questioning whether an autopsy could accurately determine the time of a death and deleting all location data from the device, a detective testified on Sept. 18.
Detective Sgt. Raymond Coles of the Ocean County prosecutor’s High Tech Crime Unit also testified about finding “secret” messages sent to Austin’s phone from the man he is accused of hiring to kill his father, Mark R. Austin.
Mark J. Austin, 34, of Brick, is on trial before Superior Court Judge Guy P. Ryan, accused of soliciting his former cellmate to murder his father.
Mark R. Austin, 55, was discovered bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat in the family’s home on Acorn Drive on the night of Sept. 7, 2019.
Jeray Melton, 34, of Salem, who was the younger Austin’s cellmate at Garden State Correctional Facility for three months in 2016, has admitted killing the elder Austin.
Melton testified at the younger Austin’s trial on Sept. 11 that the defendant offered him $50,000 to commit the murder, but said he was only paid with some marijuana and cash from an automated teller machine after completing the deed.
Austin’s lawyers, Robert DeGroot and Oleg Nekritin, have argued that Melton acted on his own on motivation to steal heroin the victim was said to have picked up in Bayonne earlier that day.
Being questioned by Mara Brater, assistant Ocean County prosecutor, Coles told the jury he performed a forensic examination of a number of cellular phones seized in the case.
In examining the younger Austin’s cell phone, Coles said he learned the defendant performed a search on it at 5:18 a.m. on Sept. 9, 2019, asking whether an autopsy could accurately determine the time of a death.
Coles said Austin used the search engine DuckDuckGo to perform the inquiry. He said DuckDuckGo is “a private, secure browser that’s not selling information.”
Coles also testified that Austin made a series of requests to Google in the early morning of Sept. 9, 2019, to delete location information from his device.
At 3:36 a.m. on Sept. 9, 2019, Austin made a request to delete all location data from Sept. 7, 2019, at 4 a.m. to Sept. 8, 2019, at 5:24 a.m.
Shortly afterward, he made a request to extend the time period to 7:37 a.m. on Sept. 8, 2019, Coles testified.
The following day, Austin sent a request to delete all location data from his phone, Coles testified.
Coles also testified his examination of phones collected in the case led to the discovery of a series of text messages Melton sent to Austin over the Facebook Messenger application on the day of the murder.
The text message thread was classified as a “secret conversation, which is what Facebook called its encrypted messages back in 2019, Coles testified, explaining that now, all messages sent over the Messenger application are encrypted.
In the series of text messages, Melton told the younger Austin that the elder Austin “went into his room to do a hit,” after telling him he was a junkie.
“He noticed the cameras,” Melton said in the text-message thread.
During his testimony, Melton told the jury that the younger Austin told him security cameras at the house were shut off, but that the elder Austin noticed that.
Melton also said in the text-message thread that the elder Austin told him someone was on his way over to the house.
“I’m ready, but he said someone is coming,” Melton texted the younger Austin.
The text messages were sent from 7:15 p.m. to 7:27 p.m. on Sept. 7, 2019, Coles said.
“You didn’t find any messages from Mr. Melton stating, ‘I killed your Dad,’ and Mr. Austin stating, ‘Okay, great?” Nekritin asked the witness.
“I did not,” Coles responded.
The trial is scheduled to resume Sept. 22.
This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Brick man charged with dad’s murder deleted GPS data from phone: cop
