In 2020, Minnesota state trooper Albert Kuehne responds to a single-car accident where he encounters a 25-year-old female, who he believes has been driving while intoxicated. The state trooper later places the woman in his patrol car where the dashcam video records him demanding the woman to give him her cellphone. She complies, and as she is receiving medical attention, Kuehne goes through her cellphone, without her permission, and sends himself three (3) photographs of the woman who was either nude or partially nude.
What trooper Kuehne didn’t count on was the woman’s boyfriend later logging into her MacBook
, and would ultimately notice some unfamiliar outgoing multimedia messages (known as mms) from her iMessage account to an unknown number. You see what the woman did was linked her iMessage account to her laptop’s data. So, although the trooper apparently deleted the iMessages of the outgoing pictures from the woman’s cellphone
, the iMessages still showed up on her computer because of Apple’s syncing process.
Confronted with an unknown phone number the woman’s boyfriend calls the number shown in the messages only later to find out the person on the other end of the call was trooper Kuehne. The woman later gets a lawyer, who reported the matter to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension division. State Investigators triangulated the cellphone records from the phone, laptop data, and video from the cruiser and pursuant to a search warrant searched the contents of the trooper’s cellphone. The search revealed calls from the boyfriend as well as records of receiving the pictures from the woman’s phone on the same date of the accident.
Troop Kuehne was later arrested and charged with two felony counts of harassment with bias because the victim is a woman. Trooper Kuehne’s charges were later reduced to a misdemeanor after he took a plea deal. He is now awaiting sentencing. A copy of the complaint can be viewed here.