Special to WorldTribune.com

[Second of three excerpts from the new book, Hard Drive. Click here for Part I.]

On June 24, 2012, Dr. Shane Truman Todd, a young American engineer, was found hanging in his Singapore apartment, just a week before his scheduled return to the United States. Although Shane had repeatedly expressed apprehension that his work with a Chinese company might compromise U.S. security, authorities immediately ruled his death a suicide. Upon arriving in Singapore, his family realized the evidence suggested not suicide, but murder. Hard Drive: A Family’s Fight against Three Countries is the captivating story of Shane’s mysterious death and his family’s grueling battle to reveal the truth.

Excerpts from Chapter 7: The Discovery

Shortly after Shane’s funeral, Rick and I returned to Montana and began a letter writing campaign to our elected officials, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, and various media outlets requesting an investigation into our son’s death. On the morning of Sunday, July 22, 2012, as we were sitting at the dining room table in our apartment writing letters, Rick suddenly looked up with an expression that said, “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before.” He exclaimed, “Mary, you know that ‘speaker’ we found in Shane’s apartment, I think it might actually be an external hard drive!”

Rick ran to the back bedroom and began rummaging through the bag of Shane’s things, until he finally found the “speaker.” He returned to the dining room table and eagerly plugged it into his computer. As Shane’s files began to appear on the screen, he yelped in astonishment, “Oh my gosh, this is Shane’s backup hard drive!” Remembering what my brother Richard had warned about handling computer evidence, Rick quickly unplugged the hard drive and said, “This could be huge. Call Richard and ask him how to contact the computer forensic guy he told you about.”

When I told Richard about Rick’s discovery, he immediately put me in touch with his friend Ashraf Massoud, a computer forensic expert, who worked for DataChasers. Ashraf was friendly and professional, and told us he would be happy to examine the hard drive if we could get it to him in Southern California. Rick, knowing the possible significance of the hard drive’s contents, did not want to send it through the mail. Fortunately, our son John agreed to make the two-leg flight to Ontario, California to hand deliver the hard drive to Ashraf that same day.

* * *

Ashraf warned us that the analysis of the hard drive could take time, so as Rick and I waited a couple weeks in suspense to hear what he discovered, we continued writing letters. At that point we had no idea what kind of evidence Ashraf would find, so we only wrote about our conversations with Shane before his death, the fake suicide notes, and the defensive wounds on Shane’s body…

* * *

On Aug. 5, 2012, much sooner than we expected, we received Ashraf’s preliminary report on his analysis of Shane’s external Seagate hard drive. According to the report, it appeared Shane had performed a backup of files located in the folder C:IME on Friday morning, June 22, before his farewell luncheon. However, the most astonishing news was that the hard drive showed activity on it after Shane’s death. Ashraf’s analysis revealed the following:

• On Saturday, June 23, 2012, between 3:40am and 3:42am five folders containing IME related data were accessed, meaning they were opened and viewed for whatever reason but the contents of the folders were not changed.

• Of even greater significance, is the fact that no other user initiated activity was recorded on the hard drive throughout the remainder of June 23, 2012 through June 27, 2012, until four folders and one file were accessed on June 27, 2012, between 8:38:39pm and 8:40:28pm, three days after Shane’s body was discovered in his apartment.

• Of real concern is that the Microsoft temporary file called “~$characterization result to veeco.pptx” was deleted within that time frame. Although temporary files are usually automatically deleted, this file appears to have been manually deleted.

While we were shocked that someone was accessing Shane’s external hard drive after his death, we had no idea what any of these files meant, so Rick contacted one of Shane’s colleagues from IME. He told Rick that the files were associated with the work Shane had been doing with a Chinese company called Huawei.

Rick then asked him what kind of company Huawei was. The colleague informed him that Huawei was a telecommunications company. When Rick asked if he thought that Huawei could be involved with Shane’s death, the colleague responded that it would be highly unlikely because, “Huawei is benign; it’s like Cisco.”

Rick and I were confused. If this Chinese company were benign, then why were files associated with it accessed on Shane’s hard drive after his death? Who had opened these files and what were they looking for? We also began to realize that this might be the same Chinese company that Shane had expressed concerns about, but we still couldn’t understand why a company likened to Cisco would pose a threat to U.S. security and our son.

Sometime later, however, several friends told us about a “60 Minutes” segment that had aired on Oct. 7, 2012 on the Chinese telecommunication giant Huawei. Far from portraying Huawei as benign, the segment explained that the company had been the subject of a year-long investigation by the House Intelligence Committee and had developed a daunting reputation for industrial espionage with “murky connections to the Chinese government.”

Rick and I knew this was extremely significant, so we immediately asked Ashraf to search Shane’s hard drive for the following keywords: Huawei, GaN, U.S. export/import control law, and Patrick Lo. This process — the discovery of that hard drive and the results of Ashraf’s research — transformed our personal tragedy into a mystery worthy of international attention.

Tomorrow: Part III.

  Dr. Shane Truman Todd, Hard Drive, Hard Drive: A Family’s Fight against Three Countries, II: Family discovered ties to huge Chinese firm after son’s mysterious death, WorldTribune.com