Seized devices had foreign nationals' info ... Cop in Tommy Lee case testifies

Personal information about people from North America was at the centre of testimony given during the Tommy Lee lottery scam trial yesterday.

Detective Corporal Campbell told prosecuting attorney Sophia Thomas that he examined evidence received from investigators, which included a laptop and a one terabyte external hard drive which contained the information on the foreign nationals.

The hard drive and laptop were tendered into evidence as exhibits nine and 10 respectively.

“I found a partition on the hard drive called 'Tommy Lee'. I observed two files in the trash folder. I viewed the contents and observed they contained names, address, city, state, zip and phone numbers. It was North American numbers based on the area code,” he said.

Campbell told the court that both files contained 1001 records each, for persons living in California, Connecticut, New York, Virginia and Orlando.

The court also heard that the police found more than 5,500 more records of personal information for people living abroad on the same computer.

The items were seized in February 2014 during a search of an apartment. Four suspects, including Tommy Lee, given name Leroy Russell, and his co-accused O'Brian Smith were held at the time.

Russell and Smith were eventually charged.

During cross-examination, defence attorney Ernest Smith asked Campbell if he was assigned to the cyber unit at the time of the seizure.

“No I was not,” he answered.

After further questioning, he also admitted that he was not a trained cyber crime officer in 2014 and took control of the exhibits in 2016.

The court heard that an ex-policeman named Lionel Hamilton was the individual at the cyber unit who was previously tasked to conduct a digital forensic examination of the files.

Campbell also told the court yesterday that he does not know who sealed the bags when evidence was taken from the suspects and he does not know when the bags were sealed.

He however said he knows the exhibits by their labels, as well as the serial numbers on the devices which are said to contain the personal information.

The trial is set to resume on December 12.