Search Warrants Reveal Investigation Focus

At 3:42 a.m. on Oct. 11, Turner called 911, and deputies were dispatched to his home in Martindale, a small town of just over 1,000 people north of Austin. In front of Turner’s house, deputies found Dghoughi with a gunshot wound inside his girlfriend’s car after, according to authorities, “the homeowner confronted a suspicious vehicle outside the residence.”

Dghoughi had spent the previous day with his girlfriend at a barbecue in the nearby community of Maxwell. Sometime after 12:30 a.m., he left alone and, at some point, ended up in front of Turner’s home, about a five-minute drive away from his girlfriend’s apartment.

According to an arrest affidavit, Turner saw Dghoughi sitting in a car on his driveway. Turner grabbed his gun to confront him, walked out, and chased the car as the 31-year-old tried to back out of the driveway.

Turner stood on the driver’s side of the car, tapped the window twice, and fired once through the window, striking Dghoughi in the head, according to the arrest affidavit.

“I just killed a guy,” Turner told a dispatcher.

He claimed Dghoughi had pointed a gun at him, but no gun was found at the scene aside from the handgun used by Turner.

What deputies did find, however, was Dghoughi’s Android phone, which, according to investigative records, was seized and searched. Just before he was killed, Dghoughi had been using the GPS application on his Samsung Note 10+, deputies found.

Dghoughi, in the meantime, was taken to a nearby hospital but died from his injuries.

No search warrant was obtained by investigators to look through the phone, but other sheriff’s office records said “the expectation of privacy was surrendered on the device” after Dghoughi dropped the phone and was incapacitated by the gunshot.

On Oct. 20, investigators submitted a search warrant to Google, asking for details about Dghoughi’s email account, usernames, credit card numbers, contacts, calendars, voicemails, pictures, and GPS locations. They also noted and requested information for any “tombstone accounts” on Google, meaning any accounts that Dghoughi had deleted recently.

It’s not clear what investigators hoped to learn from their probe. Dghoughi and Turner had never met before the Oct. 11 shooting. Yet deputies wanted to learn details about the apps Dghoughi had downloaded and the pictures he’d stored on his phone.

Investigators also submitted a search warrant for Dghoughi’s Facebook information, seeking information on what he posted and what other devices he might have used to log in.

Facebook regularly fields requests from law enforcement seeking information on official investigations. Shortly after the inquiry, Dghoughi’s Facebook profile was taken down. The sudden disappearance of his photos, videos, posts, and messages was devastating to his family, who’d turned to the account to remember him after his death. They asked their attorney to find out what happened. When they found out that investigators were probing his electronic history, they were confused and angry.

“It has nothing to do with the case,” his mother, Fatiha Haouass, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s his private life, in the past, before he was shot.”

Following his death, she traveled from her home in Morocco to Texas to be closer to her surviving son and to monitor the investigation. She’s still worried about how the sheriff’s office is handling the case.

“I came here for that purpose from Morocco, but I never got any answers,” she said.