Court gives Leon-Issa, Gabriel King’s mother, three more months to allow police access to cellphone

A Supreme Court judge has given Amoi Leon-Issa, the mother of slain nine-year-old Gabriel King, another three months to give police investigators access to data in her cellular phone.

The police have been trying for months to access the phone as part of their investigation into King's gruesome murder on January 13 last year.

St James Parish Judge Sasha Marie Ashley first granted the police a production order in September last year compelling Leon-Issa to turn over communication and other data from her iPhone within 48 hours.

She challenged the order in court a month later.

As a result, it was varied to block her from being present while police investigators accessed the phone, but allowed her attorney and a computer expert of her choice to “observe” the process.

In February this year, Leon-Issa went back to court to seek judicial review of the revised production.

Senior Puisne Judge Lorna Shelly Williams, in a ruling on Wednesday, said that the production order was not ultra vires.

As a result, she ordered that the St James businesswoman comply with the order by July 31.

The application for leave to seek judicial review of the production order was refused.

Justice Shelly Williams noted that the amended production order has several orders that provide safeguards and protects information concerning third parties not associated with the investigations.

“The production order allows for the extraction of the information from the iPhone to be undertaken in the presence of the applicant's attorney as well as an approved computer expert of the applicant's choosing,” the judge ruled, making reference to Leon-Issa.

The judge noted, also, that the law puts safeguards in place that allow for cops to be charged and placed before the court if any information extracted from the iPhone is disclosed to the public.

According to the police, Leon-Issa reported that she was slapped in the face and dragged from her vehicle by two men after she slowed down to navigate a pothole-riddled corridor while driving along the Tucker main road towards downtown Montego Bay at about 9:30 a.m. on January 13, 2022.

The men sped off in the vehicle with Gabriel still on the backseat.

The vehicle was found abandoned on the Fairfield main road several hours later with the body of the nine-year-old boy soaked in blood.

A bloody knife that was found beside Gabriel's body was confirmed to be the murder weapon, said investigators, citing DNA analysis of the blood sample.

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