“Go a head just kill her.” Those are the words that prosecutors contend then-16-year-old Brittany Navarra text messaged to the cell phone of Dustin Gran in 2008 shortly before he allegedly beat Madera teen Krista Pike to death.
While the sentence was short, and set strikingly against a deep-red background, the technical process used to allegedly find it within Gran’s cell phone took hours of explanation during a pre-trial hearing Thursday.
Edwin Vargas, a criminalist with the California Department of Justice (DOJ), took the court through the computer systems he used at the time to pull data out of cell phones allegedly involved in Pike’s murder.
Thursday’s hearing comes before a jury is selected in Gran’s case, who faces charges of murder, attempted rape, burglary, and robbery in Pike’s death. That trial could begin by the end of this month...