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Creato jury gets tutorial in social media

Jurors in the David Creato murder trial Tuesday heard lengthy testimony from an expert prosecution witness about how cellphones and social media store messages and other data.

Jurors in the David Creato murder trial Tuesday heard lengthy testimony from an expert prosecution witness about how cellphones and social media store messages and other data.

The most intriguing piece of potential evidence was a photo of a wooded river area taken on Creato's iPhone on October 11, 2015, a day and a half before his three-year-old son Brendan's body was found near the Cooper River in Haddon Township.

Lou Cinquanto, head of a digital data recovery company called Cornerstone Discovery, told the court the GPS coordinates of where the camera was when the photo was taken, but neither he nor assistant prosecutor linked it specifically to the murder scene.

Cinquanto also testified that he found  thousands of text messages and communications between Creato, now 23, and his then girlfriend, Julia Stensky, now 19. She is not charged in the murder and is not present in the courtroom.

The prosecution alleges Creato killed Brendan shortly before reporting him missing at 6 am on October 13, 2015, because Stensky resented the boy's presence in Creato's life and was threatening to leave him.

Much of Cinquanto's testimony was technical as he pointed to an onscreen Power Point presentation of phone and Facebook and Snapchat communication between Creato and Stensky on and around the time of the murder.

Creato, who sat to the right of his defense attorney, did not position himself so that he could see the very large TV type screen, but instead listened impassively to the testimony.

Testimony in the case will resume Tuesday afternoon.