THUNDER BAY — Kaveh Lozoomi-Garmroodi’s cell phone was connected to the blue Dodge Ram truck that was tracked to the scene where Samatar Warsame’s body was found, according to testimony heard in court this week.
Information gathered during the first 24 hours following the homicide of Warsame in Thunder Bay in 2019 revealed that the Dodge Ram had been to several locations, including the site of the murder, according to Sgt. Luke Robillard with the OPP.
Robillard, who became the lead investigator on the case starting in September 2019, first took the stand on Wednesday afternoon and finished Friday morning during the second week of the jury trial for Lozoomi, of Toronto, who is charged with the first-degree murder of Warsame.
Warsame’s body was discovered at the shoulder of Highway 527 on Jan. 13, 2019 after police received a 911 call, according to Robillard’s testimony.
The jury heard evidence from what Robillard described as a large investigation. In the three months following the homicide Robillard said more than 1,000 people were canvassed, approximately 75 video sources were collected from homes, businesses and dash cams and information was collected from four cell phones that were seized.
Robillard said that what emerged from the 40-month investigation was that three males, Lozoomi, Jerome Belle, now deceased, and Hikomel Joiles left Thunder Bay on Jan. 13, 2019 in a blue Dodge Ram that had a GPS device on it, after making dozens of stops around this city.
Some of those stops, according to Robillard, included addresses on Gore Street, Sherrington Drive, Finlayson Street and Cornwall Avenue. There were also several stops at an address on Walkover Street.
Robillard said that police used information from the Ram’s uConnect software to confirm Lozoomi’s cell phone connection to the vehicle, corroborating this with evidence from the phone itself and video footage throughout the hours surrounding the time of the offence.
Robillard said police ultimately determined that a white Dodge Durango was also important in the investigation because it was travelling with the Ram throughout the day and night of Jan. 12 – 13, 2019. The Durango was rented at Pearson Airport in Toronto and discovered, abandoned, in Thunder Bay on Jan. 17, 2019.
Robillard said that information collected from the GPS tracker on the Ram corroborated details from four phones seized with the vehicle when it was detained in Blind River the afternoon of Jan. 13, 2019.
The jury saw a video from two weeks prior to the homicide that was collected from Lozoomi’s phone.
The driver, who appears to be alone in the vehicle is travelling in the East Mall area of Toronto and pulls into a parking lot and says that this is the residence of Warsame, and points out Warsame’s mom’s vehicle. Robillard said police checked the licence plate of this vehicle and confirmed that it belonged to Warsame’s mother.
During cross examination defence lawyer Ian McCuaig asked Robillard about search warrants and questioned why, after Joiles’ statement made to police in 2022, the police did not ask to search the phone that Joiles left with once he was released after being detained in Blind River in 2019.
Robillard said the police need reasonable grounds of an offence to acquire a search warrant, so when Joiles’ statement was made three years after the offence, it was unclear whether he still had that same phone in his possession.
McCuaig asked Robillard if he was aware of the general rule for how cell phones connect to towers, and said that sometimes if there are many cell towers in a vicinity that bodies of water, buildings, or rock can change which tower a phone connects to.
He asked Robillard about a tower dump, a method to collect information from a cell phone company about a particular phone’s whereabouts at any given time. He asked why police did not request a tower dump from the site near the location on Walkover Street where the victim was known to have been confined for hours prior to the murder.
Robillard said the police did request a tower dump production order from the cell tower nearest the scene of the homicide, but this did not give them any new information. He said the homicide investigation did not include a tower dump of the location in town because the police are required to balance the public interest in an expectation of privacy.
He said that a tower dump releases information about hundreds of people in a given area, and the information about the case would be limited and the police already had key information from the phones that were seized from Lozoomi, Belle and Joiles in Blind River.
Robillard said that the process of the investigation was to collect as much video footage, cell phone data and information through canvassing as soon as possible before that information, in particularly through video surveillance, could be overwritten.
The trial will continue next week.
None of the allegations against the accused have been proven in court.
