One of the Florida teens who was lost at sea last year apparently attempted to send his mother a heartfelt text message, but it cut off before he could tell her where he was.
Perry Cohen and his friend Austin Stephanos had gone missing off the coast of Jupiter, Florida, last summer.
Their boat capsized, but right before that, Cohen tried to send a text from his friend’s iPhone.
Rescue crews finally recovered the phone last month, when the teen’s boat was found near Bermuda, which is about 1,000 miles from the boys’ home. The phone was found in the dinghy’s tackle box.
“Mom, it’s Perry. My iPad is dead, I'll text you in a little. Love you,” Perry wrote to his mother, Pamela, on July 24, reported CBS Miami.
She wrote back: “OK. I wanted you to sleep home tonight, I miss you. We leave Sunday morning for New York. What about your work?”
“But I was going to sleep at,,,” he wrote back to her. That was the final thing he wrote.
The two teenagers had experience as boaters and grew up on the water. Their boat went missing July 24, but their boat was found two days later, but by the time a salvage crew went out to secure the boat, it went missing.
Austin’s iPhone has set off a rift between the boys’ families. On Sunday, Cohen’s family filed a lawsuit asking for investigators to search the phone for clues about the disappearance. The Stephanoses wanted the phone returned to their family while Cohen’s family wanted it turned over to relevant law enforcement agencies. The iPhone was turned over to the Stephanos family, according to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
According to the Sun-Sentinel on Tuesday, Cohen’s family said it is willing to drop the suit and is willing to accept the “offer of Blue Stephanos to share the contents of the iPhone with us and the FWC.”
“Therefore we will be withdrawing our lawsuit as soon as FWC receives the written consents it needs from both families to put the iPhone in the hands of the best impartial iPhone extraction experts available, in a proper legal chain of custody,” Pamela Cohen said. She wanted the FWC to maintain possession of the phone.
Blu Stephanos, Austin’s mother, responded to the lawsuit and said that “any relevant information that might be retrieved from Austin’s phone will be shared with the Cohen family and the proper authorities.”
