Even though he was told Ross Harris and his wife researched in-car child deaths on the Internet, a Cobb County computer forensics expert on Friday said he found no evidence that they did.
Ray Yeager, once a member of Cobb’s high-tech crime squad, testified that he searched through and analyzed data on cellphones and computers owned by Harris and his now-ex-wife Leanna Taylor. He then turned over this information to Cobb investigators.
Harris is on trial for the murder of his 22-month-old son Cooper, accused of intentionally leaving the child in his SUV for seven hours to die on a hot day in June 2014. Harris’ lawyers contend the child’s death was a horrible accident.
They also have accused Cobb police of perpetrating perhaps the most damning misconception of the case: that Harris had researched how long it takes a child to die in a hot car. The only apparent evidence about that topic came out during a probable cause hearing little more than two weeks after Cooper’s death. At that hearing, lead Detective Phil Stoddard testified that Harris told him he had looked at video of an advocate who had lost his child and who gave advice on how to prevent that from happening.
On Friday, Carlos Rodriguez, one of Harris’ defense attorneys, got Yeager to confirm he was told by police that the former Harris and his former wife Leanna allegedly researched how children die in cars. Rodriguez asked Yeager if he found such information in any of Harris’ searches, noting that the forensics expert made no mention of any such thing in his reports.
Yeager said if he searched for it and didn’t find it, he would not have put it in his report. Likewise, if he hadn’t searched for it, it wouldn’t have been in his report, he said.
Because this seemed like an important issue with a case that involved the death of a child in a car, wouldn’t you have checked this out? Rodriguez asked.
“More likely, yes,” Yeager responded.
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