Crime & Safety

Boken Family: Phone Industry, Apple Partially to Blame for Megan's Murder

Reports suggest that the Wheaton native and St. Francis alum was killed in a robbery over her iPhone, a device that has been involved in many violent and fatal thefts.

With the iPhone having become a magnet for theives and violent armed robbers—so much that police actually refer to "Apple picking" as a trend—as reported by the Huffington Post, the August 2012 murder of Wheaton native Megan Boken in a St. Louis robbery over her new iPhone stands as one among a distressing number of examples of violence and slayings over the phones.

According to police, a man later identified as 18-year-old Keith Esters confessed to having targeted Megan after seeing her talking on her iPhone, for which she had replaced her Blackberry just a month earlier.

 In the process of the robbery, Esters shot her twice and killed her, police said. Esters and his cousin have been charged with first- and second-degree murder, respectively, as well as with separate charges of robbery and kidnapping.

The Post reports that Megan's father, Paul Boken, keeps the iPhone in a box at home and cannot manage to discard it. He told the paper that the phone industry's unwillingness to take steps to curb the value of stolen phones is partially to blame for his daughter's murder. 

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"Phone manufacturers, including Apple, should have addressed this problem three or four years ago,” Boken told the Post. “I don’t think they realized someone as special as Megan can lose her life over this.

“As a father, you invest all of this time in your children... You show them how to walk and throw a baseball and hit a volleyball. You watch them develop and take on life’s challenges. Then, all of a sudden, it's over. That’s the hardest part. You don’t get to see the next 10 chapters of that book.”

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