Former UNC student Chandler Kania's pre-trial hearing in Orange County Courthouse Tuesday centered around his iPhone.
Authorities say Kania was driving drunk on the wrong side of I-85 in July 2015 when he was involved in a head-on collision, killing three people and injuring a fourth.
One of Kania’s defense lawyers, Roger Smith Jr., filed two motions that were heard in front of Judge Allen Baddour and Orange County Assistant District Attorney Jeffrey Neiman. The first was a motion to suppress evidence found on Kania’s iPhone, and the second was to postpone the trial date.
In his testimony, Sgt. John Collins of the N.C. Highway Patrol said one of Kania’s fraternity brothers told Collins he had taken Kania’s phone on the night of the crash in an attempt to keep him from leaving the Sigma Phi Epsilon parking lot. The phone was not found on Kania at the scene of the crash.
A search warrant was drafted for the phone that gave officers the right to search Kania, his parents and any others in Kania’s hospital room. When Sgt. Michael Stuart arrived at UNC Hospitals July 23, Kania’s parents said the phone was in their Asheboro home and they were willing to retrieve it, Stuart said.
Instead, Stuart sent a former Randolph County trooper Christopher Azelton to retrieve it from the Kania home. Michael Kania, the defendant's father, handed over the phone to the trooper without argument, despite the search warrant being for Kania's hospital room. Azelton said he never entered the Kania home.
Roger Smith said the evidence should be thrown out due to improper service of the search warrant.
“Michael Kania being searched in Asheboro is clearly outside the scope,” Smith said. “The fatal flaw is that you can’t search somebody with a search warrant for a hospital room in Orange County in Asheboro.”
The state defended keeping the phone evidence because the search warrant was valid and the iPhone was handed over to authorities consensually and without improper search.
