This recent discussion of SnapChat got me thinking about what we really "know" or don't know about the facts of this case, so I went back to read some of the initial media stories.
This is from the patch.com story on Jan. 5th:
"Annee Della Donna, an attorney and friend of the family, discussed the timeline since Blaze's mysterious disappearance."At 9:30 p.m., he sent a text message with his family's Lake Forest address for a high school buddy to pick him up and take him to the park to meet the third person," she said. "The park is five minutes away and they got there about 10:30 p.m. Bernstein went off alone into the park while his friend waited back in the car."
Two things about this:
1) Here (and in other stories I read) they say the evidence of contact between Blaze and the driver is via 'text message'. Text (SMS) messages are different than SnapChat and don't disappear until manually deleted. I'm curious if they were using the term 'text message' generically and it could have been SnapChat or if it really was an SMS message, which is a very basic form of phone communication and NOT Internet/app based.
2) This article doesn't state where the attorney got this info - from the message itself or from the driver's story. If they actually read the message then it casts many theories about why Blaze left the house aside, does it not?
There are several other things in the quote above which I think are unverifiable and certainly just the attorney and reporter articulating the driver's story. At that point they possibly had no reason to doubt him, but if he's a potential suspect and given the affidavit, etc., we need to take a closer look at all of the the early reporting and discern what things the family were repeating that were part of the driver's story versus those that are verifiable facts.
I'm also unclear about how we know in general what was on SnapChat vs. SMS - most of the reporting simply says 'text message'
