Baltimore County detective suspended after warrantless search of murder suspect’s phone

A Baltimore County Police detective has been suspended after he looked through a cellphone belonging to a murder suspect without a search warrant and later lied about it.

For weeks, the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office maintained that police did not go through Rashard Mack’s iPhone until after they got a warrant.

But prosecutors later acknowledged that investigators gained access to the phone several times before that happened. Detective Storm Sheckells, who accurately guessed the passcode to the device, has been suspended.

“This is absolutely the most brazen form of police misconduct I think I’ve actually witnessed,” Assistant Public Defender Maureen Apugo, one of Mack’s attorneys, said in court. “It really just gives me a great deal of pause as to how phones are being handled.”

Baltimore County Circuit Judge Michael Finifter heard legal arguments Monday on multiple requests from Mack’s attorneys, including to throw out all the charges, bar two detectives from testifying at trial and exclude all evidence gained from the phone.

Finifter said he would issue a written opinion as soon as possible.

Assistant State’s Attorney Michelle Fuller conceded that police searched the phone before they obtained a warrant but argued that the evidence was still admissible.

As soon as his office learned that the search happened, prosecutors disclosed the information to defense attorneys, Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger said in an interview. He also said Sheckells “misled us and others that he had not looked at the phone.”

“We take disclosures, even those that hurt our case, very seriously,” Shellenberger said.

In an email, Joy Stewart, a police spokesperson, said Sheckells is “currently suspended with pay pending an internal investigation.”

Sheckells could not be reached for comment. The president of the local police union, Doug Jess, declined to comment.

Mack, 24, of Northeast Baltimore, is charged with first-degree murder and carrying a dangerous weapon in the fatal stabbing of his ex-girlfriend, Taejhiana Walker, 22, of New York, inside her apartment in Parkville on March 29, 2025. He’s being held without bail in the Baltimore County Detention Center.

His attorneys first started raising questions earlier this year about the searches.

In a letter dated Feb. 19, Apugo requested information such as how detectives learned the passcode to her client’s phone. Mack did not provide it to police.

Prosecutors responded that “materials have been provided in discovery.”

But Apugo pointed out that a text message was marked as read while police were interrogating him.

When Detective James Lambert was interviewing Mack, Sheckells picked up the phone and correctly guessed the passcode, prosecutors then revealed. It was Mack’s date of birth.

Sheckells unlocked the phone for a second time to confirm the passcode was correct, they reported, and then for a third and final time to show Lambert that it worked.

But prosecutors contended that police putting the passcode into the phone was not a search.

No one, they reported, read or examined the contents of the phone until after a judge approved a warrant.

Later, prosecutors wrote that they subsequently learned information in their previous court filing was inaccurate, adding that the “investigation into this matter is ongoing.”

The reversal came after Mack’s attorneys gave them a report from their own expert in digital forensics, who uncovered that the phone was unlocked two additional times. That’s including one period that lasted more than 13 minutes.

On June 5, Fuller and Assistant State’s Attorney Emily Abell disclosed that Sheckells twice denied to a police forensic scientist that he had searched the phone.

Fuller and Abell said the Police Department suspended Sheckells on May 28 but did not provide further details.

During the Monday hearing, Lambert, a 30-year veteran of the force, testified that he did not think that there was anything wrong with police guessing the passcode to a phone.

Sheckells, he said, flashed the phone at him. The Safari app was open.

“It was seconds, literally, when the phone was open,” Lambert said. “I didn’t believe that was a search.”

Lambert testified that he did not think that action was relevant to include in the application for the search warrant. He said he had been unaware that anything further had happened.

“I knew the phone was accessed,” Lambert testified, “but I never knew the phone was searched.”