Police in South Florida plan to interrogate a potential witness to a fatal stabbing: Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker app.
Last week, the South Florida SunSentinel reported that police in Hallandale Beach issued a search warrant for anything recorded by two devices – an Echo and Echo Dot – found in the apartment where a woman who was arguing with her boyfriend was killed in July. Police have accused Adam Reechard Crespo of murdering his girlfriend, Silvia Galva.
When police arrived at the apartment, they found Galva in one of the bedrooms in Crespo’s condo. She was bleeding to death from a stab wound in her chest, as Crespo tried to stanch the bleeding and save her life. Police also found the spear that, as Crespo told them, he had pulled from her chest: a spear with a 12-inch, double-sided blade. Crespo says that Galva had been drinking, and that he’d tried to kick her out of the bedroom, but she resisted, grabbing onto the spear – at the foot of the bed – for leverage. He says he kept pulling, without turning around, until he heard a snap. That’s when the spear she was holding onto snapped and impaled her, police said. A friend of Galva’s was in the condo at the time and told police that she’d heard arguing coming from the bedroom but couldn’t make out the details of the fight. That’s where Alexa comes in. The voice assistant, which runs in Amazon’s Echo smart speakers, waits for its trigger word – the default is “Alexa,” though owners can change it to “Amazon,” “Computer” or “Echo” – and then starts to listen for commands. In other words, it begins to record.