The lead police investigator in the case against Nima Momeni (possibly the last witness prosecutors will call in the ongoing murder trial for Cash App founder Bob Lee) revealed today that Momeni’s brother-in-law was researching how to wipe iPhones in the days after the murder.

Sergeant. Brent Dittmer, who was questioned by prosecutors for less than two hours, served primarily to piece together the past 10 days of testimony from other witnesses he interviewed or police officers he supervised during the investigation of the case.

But his testimony did not answer remaining questions about the motive or disposition of the killing, which prosecutors must prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt to convict Momeni of murder.

When Momeni’s home was searched during his arrest nine days after the stabbing in April 2023, several phones were found.

All of those phones were activated shortly before Momeni’s arrest, Dittmer said today. Both Momeni and her sister Khazar had handed over their phones to Momeni’s lawyer, Paula Canny, at the time. They were both given new phones. It is not clear whether there were new phones among those searched.

Eventually the police took the phones from Canny. Dittmer did not specify that any data had been deleted from them, but called Momeni’s decision to give her phone number “unusual and suspicious.”

Around the same time, Hazar’s husband, plastic surgeon Dino Elyassnia, also researched deleting data from iPhones, Dittmer said.

Ditmer: Here’s the web history report from the extraction… the title says, ‘How to erase iPhone’ Google search… And then a category that says ‘deleted: yes’.

Talay: … What do we see here?

Ditmer: “This is a report of items searched on iPhone…under ‘deleted’ it says ‘yes’ and there is nothing on the account. Second item… again the value is ‘How to erase iPhone’.

It’s unclear whether any data was deleted from Elyassnia’s phone beyond these searches; Dittmer said nothing about it and was not asked about it. Another witness earlier testified that Momeni’s mother and sister tried to sell his BMW in the weeks after his arrest. Police were searching for the vehicle and eventually located it at a BMW dealership in San Francisco.

Prosecutors today also tried to introduce text messages taken from Elyassnia’s phone, but the judge accepted the objection of defense lawyers and did not allow the question.