Authorities still aren’t quite sure what happened in a case in London, Ontario, Canada, where an 18-year-old man set out to find his missing smartphone using GPS and ended up shot to death. He tracked his phone remotely, and followed it to an address in the city of London. After a confrontation with three men in a car, he was shot and killed.

It’s the parts between finding the phone and his death that police are still figuring out, the CBC reports. Police aren’t able to find any connections between the phone’s owner and the three men in the car: there’s no evidence that they knew each other at all. The three suspects haven’t been publicly identified.

Thanks to uninvolved witnesses, they know that the man had left his phone in a taxi, and set out to find it. The phone was traced to that address, and the owner of the phone approached the driver’s side of the car, a Mazda. The car drove off, and he tried to hold on to the vehicle. There were gunshots, presumably from inside the vehicle, and he let go of the car.

After the shooting, the men crashed the Mazda into a fence and a telephone pole, and abandoned the vehicle.

A police spokesperson explained that this shouldn’t necessarily scare people away from using phone-locating apps, but that they should exercise caution and bring in law enforcement if they think it’s possible that the device was stolen or that the person who has it may become violent.

“It wasn’t the app that took away [his] life, it was the individuals, which would be rare, who happened to be armed with a gun,” the spokesperson told the CBC. Having a gun isn’t necessarily rare, but using it to scare off a dude looking for his phone is.

Shooting over cellphone: case is ‘extreme’, say police [CBC]

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