A Dallas, Texas man said he was able to catch burglars on camera from 1,400 miles away with the help of a $4.99 iPhone application.

Vincent Hunter said he was in Connecticut Friday afternoon when the iPhone app, iCam, alerted him to movement on the Web cams set up inside his home, WFAA-TV, Dallas, reported Tuesday.

“I’ve got a few webcams set up,” he said. “We could see it unfolding.”

Hunter said the application allowed him to view a live feed of two men shattering his patio door with a brick. He said he called 911 and watched as Dallas police entered the home seeking the two men, who fled the house.

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The bodies of two children trapped inside a car submerged in the Edisto River in South Carolina have been recovered, and their mother has been arrested, authorities said Monday.

State troopers responded to a report of a car accident early Monday and found a Chrysler sedan in the water near a boat landing in Orangeburg County. Divers discovered the bodies of the two boys, ages 1 and 2, which were taken from the car and sent to the county coroner for autopsies, authorities said.

Their mother is 29-year-old Shaquan Duley, Sheriff Larry Williams told HLN’s Nancy Grace. She was arrested and charged with leaving the scene of an accident.

Williams said the boys’ mother walked almost a mile before calling for help. While the woman described the incident as an accident, Williams told CNN that “it has a stench of foul play.”

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BOSTON — A former medical student accused of killing a masseuse he met through Craigslist committed suicide in the Boston jail where he was awaiting trial, authorities said Sunday.

Philip Markoff, 24, was found unresponsive in his cell Sunday morning in the Nashua Street Jail, the Suffolk County district attorney’s office said in an e-mailed statement, and he was pronounced dead at about 10:15 a.m.

“Markoff was alone in his cell, and all evidence collected thus far indicates that he took his own life,” the statement said.

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The sophisticated  iPhone is becoming as popular with police as it is with consumers because it can provide investigators with so much information that can help in solving crimes.

Why? When you hit the delete button, it’s never really deleted!

The devices can help police learn where you’ve been, what you were doing there and whether you’ve got something to hide.

Former hacker Jonathan Zdziarski, author of iPhone Forensics (O’Reilly Media) for law enforcement, said the devices “are people’s companions today. They organize people’s lives.”

And if you’re doing something criminal, something about it is probably going to go through that phone:

• Every time an iPhone user closes out of the built-in mapping application, the phone snaps a screenshot and stores it. Savvy law-enforcement agents armed with search warrants can use those snapshots to see if a suspect is lying about whereabouts during a crime.

• iPhone photos are embedded with GEO tags and identifying information, meaning that photos posted online might not only include GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken, but also the serial number of the phone that took it.

• Even more information is stored by the applications themselves, including the user’s browser history. That data is meant in part to direct custom-tailored advertisements to the user, but experts said some of it could be useful to police.

Clearing out user histories isn’t enough to clean the device of that data, said John B. Minor, a member of the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners.

Just as users can take and store a picture of their iPhone’s screen, the phone itself automatically shoots and stores hundreds of such images as people close out one application to use another.

“Those screen snapshots can contain images of e-mails or proof of activities that might be inculpatory or exculpatory,” Minor said.

• The keyboard cache logs everything that you type in to learn autocorrect so that it can correct a user’s typing mistakes. Apple doesn’t store that cache very securely, Zdziarski contended, so someone with know-how could recover months of typing in the order in which it was typed, even if the e-mail or text it was part of has long since been deleted.

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Manchester, Connecticut – Nine people were killed and another two injured after an employee of a Manchester beer distributor opened fire inside the business Tuesday morning, officials said.

Multiple workers of Hartford Distributors were shot inside the business at about 7 a.m., police said. Police said the gunman, identified as Omar Thornton, was among the dead. Police said Thornton was found inside an office in the building at about 8:15 a.m. with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Police said Thornton attended a disciplinary conference before the gunfire broke out. Union officials told Eyewitness News that Thornton, who was a driver with the company, was facing disciplinary action in connection with a theft at the business. The owner of the company was preparing to let Thornton go when witnesses said “all hell broke loose” Tuesday morning.
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