Visitors take photos at a sign outside Meta headquarters on Thursday, March 26, 2026, in Menlo Park, Calif.
Noah Berger / AP
On a directionless summer night, two teenage boys crossed paths on the outskirts of Salem. One fatally shot the other. Two teenage girls saw it happen.
Cellphones carried by all four had orbited the scene, tracing the teens’ movements and logging their messages and phone calls. And somewhere in that data may lie the shooter’s best hope to beat a life sentence.
It’s undisputed that David Ayon-Urbano killed Hector de Jesus Gonzalez Mendoza that June 2024 night on the side of Skyline Road.
Ayon-Urbano has since sat in a cell in Linn County Jail maintaining that he never meant to kill 16-year-old Gonzalez Mendoza, that it was a tragic case of wrong place, wrong time, wrong people.
A conviction for second-degree murder carries the possibility of a life sentence. The contents of the cellphone messages may or may not prove defense attorneys’ theory that Ayon-Urbano acted in self-defense, and that one of the witnesses orchestrated the shooting.
To prove that, they need to compel one of the biggest companies in the world to hand over users’ private social media data.
Defense attorney Zachary Stern wants to access messages, call records and geolocation data held by Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. He hopes to show Ayon-Urbano was unwittingly caught in the crossfire of rival gangs and protected himself.
White-shoe attorneys for Meta, meanwhile, argue federal privacy protections for users prohibit them from complying with subpoenas from criminal defendants.
So, Stern has argued, how can a defendant be given a fair trial if their attorneys are shut out from credible evidence? A hearing before the Oregon Supreme Court set for Tuesday will determine if Meta should disclose its data.
The case is surfacing concerns from some legal experts about whether Meta’s interpretation of the Stored Communications Act has locked away important evidence in cases across the country. It’s a debate over the rights of people accused of crimes and digital privacy.
Sealed investigation into the shooting
For a case heading to the state Supreme Court, details are scarce about the killing at its center.
The Marion County District Attorney’s Office has so far kept sealed police reports and investigative records that would detail the police’s account of that evening.
Stern and his co-counsel, likewise, have declined multiple requests by OPB to obtain the records. The attorneys said they believe the documents unfairly portray their client.
The details below are largely stitched together through the minimal detail within court records and media reports from the evening.
Ayon-Urbano spent that June 23, 2024, night driving city roads in his Chevy pickup. He rode with two girls, one of them identified by defense attorneys as Ayon-Urbano’s girlfriend.
OPB is identifying the second girl as “K.T.” due to defense attorneys’ theory that she helped arrange the fatal encounter that came later.
The three teens drank alcohol and hung out. When they made a pit-stop at a WinCo grocery store, Ayon-Urbano and his girlfriend went inside the store and left K.T. in the truck. He heard K.T. on a brief phone call when he returned.
At points, K.T. suggested they meet up with Hector de Jesus Gonzalez Mendoza, a friend of hers. The young couple brushed off the idea.
As the night wore on, Ayon-Urbano began to pass out. He let K.T. drive the truck. He slept for a short time and woke up as the truck parked on Skyline Road, in a part of town he didn’t recognize. And there was a new person in the mix: Gonzalez Mendoza.
Gonzalez Mendoza was wearing a black-and-white bandana associated with the 18th Street Gang tied around his neck.
In 2024, Salem and Marion County had both feared gang violence had been on the rise. Each had commissioned crime analyses that linked local gangs to an uptick in violence perpetrated by juveniles, particularly gun violence.
Another incident that spring particularly shook Salemites: a 16-year-old had been shot dead less than two miles from the state’s Capitol building, at Bush’s Pasture Park, during a suspected gang fight involving groups of teenagers.
The teen killed was one of Ayon-Urbano’s friends and classmates. He was gunned down by a member of the 18th Street Gang, according to Stern. Despite his friend’s ties to gangs, Stern has said Ayon-Urbano had no affiliation.
When he saw Gonzalez Mendoza’s bandana that evening in June, Ayon-Urbano believed he had been “set up.”
Stern hasn’t said why Ayon-Urbano would be targeted. But the teen purportedly told police that night he had no intention of encountering Gonzalez Mendoza.
The two exchanged “comments,” Stern later said in court. Then gunshots rang out. Gonzalez Mendoza died at the scene.
The next morning, Ayon-Urbano appeared in the jail’s blue jumpsuit garb in front of a Marion County judge, plexiglass partitioning him from the rest of the room.
The prosecutor pointed the judge to their sealed investigative records and argued Ayon-Urbano should be held indefinitely.
The judge agreed that those records portrayed a “strong” presumption that Ayon-Urbano was guilty of murder, and denied him the chance to post bail.
A dead end leads to the Oregon Supreme Court
The killing briefly hit local headlines, but details remained elusive. One report from the Statesman-Journal newspaper wrote that a search warrant “provided little information,” but “noted that a reliable eyewitness and physical evidence tied Ayon-Urbano to the shooting.”
Another outlet, Salem Reporter, interviewed Gonzalez Mendoza’s mother about her son. He liked boxing, basketball and rap music. He had been a student at McKay High School.
Luz Mendoza said she was still processing what happened but confirmed her son “was shot more than once.”
A week into the criminal proceedings, prosecutors notified the court that they planned to seek a harsher sentence for Ayon-Urbano. They wrote to the court that the killing was “motivated by bias” and that the teenaged shooter lacked remorse.
Stern’s defense of Ayon-Urbano, meanwhile, became more about what was missing from the record. He believed evidence existed to bolster his claim that Ayon-Urbano was not executing a gang killing.
His suspicions zeroed in on the teens’ phones and messages.
Ayon-Urbano had heard the other girl in his truck, K.T., talking to an unidentified person through Instagram’s call feature and saying they’d “drive to his location and pick him,” court records said. She also suggested multiple times that they go meet up with Gonzalez Mendoza.
After the shooting, detectives placed witnesses in interview rooms. Security footage showed K.T. had unfettered access to her phone, messaging family members and perusing social media, court records said.
That night, both girls gave detectives consent to search their phones. Ayon-Urbano’s girlfriend’s phone didn’t turn up much in the investigation.
The extraction on K.T.’s phone, on the other hand, came up nearly empty. After Stern grumbled in an email about the “sliver” of material generated by the county offices, a sheriff’s office staffer said the brand of K.T.’s phone — a Google Pixel 7 — rarely surrendered as much metadata as other brands.
Stern and the attorneys instead looked at posts on her public Instagram.
Two months after the shooting, she had inked a tattoo of a Hello Kitty that she said was drawn by Gonzalez Mendoza; it held a heart with dates of his birth and death. In one January 2025 post, she posted a collage of him and wrote:
“I miss you Hector it’s crazy to say it’s been over half a year since you past away feels like just yesterday I was hitting licks and getting drunk with you.”
Stern had expected that detectives, looking to piece together the details that preceded that night’s shooting, would have searched the phones belonging to Ayon-Urbano and Gonzalez Mendoza. They had not.
According to the Marion County District Attorney’s Office, detectives “did not believe they had the lawful authority” to search either of their phones. A representative wrote in an email to OPB that law enforcement can’t “search any phone they want.”
“Any impression that law enforcement is failing to do due diligence by failing to (search a phone) would be both inappropriate and wildly inaccurate,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Brendan Murphy wrote.
A detective at one point made a to-do list that included getting warrants to search the phones belonging to “sus / vic,” court records show. But that was amended later — in someone else’s handwriting — with the phrase: “none needed.”
The phone that belonged to Gonzalez Mendoza was, according to prosecutors, actually his mother’s. Lacking probable cause, in their view, prosecutors said she would have to consent to a search.
Luz Mendoza bristled at the suggestion of handing over the phone’s contents. Ayon-Urbano showed no remorse, she wrote in a letter to the court, and “should never be let out of prison or be allowed to use my son’s records to justify his actions.”
Facing these dead ends, the defense attorneys turned to the digital source: Meta Platforms Inc. They wrote a subpoena, cribbing the language detectives often use in their search warrants, and asked for data related to Instagram accounts connected to K.T. and Gonzalez Mendoza.
FILE - The Instagram logo is seen on a cell phone in Boston, Oct. 14, 2022.
Michael Dwyer / AP
They hoped to get location data and communications that would shed light on the night of the shooting. They asked for search history information between the day before and the day after. They also sought any information associated with the shooting at Bush’s Pasture Park that spring.
Meta, citing a 40-year-old law, objected.
The conglomerate argued that the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986, prohibited it from disclosing chat records to criminal defendants. A Marion County judge agreed and quashed the subpoena.
In a May 2025 hearing, facing a courtroom loss and setback, Stern underlined what he believed to be a critical flaw: he’s constitutionally bound to find the facts for a robust defense.
Defense attorneys “have to do a constitutionally adequate investigation into the facts of circumstances” in order to achieve a fair trial. Marion County had Gonzalez Mendoza’s phone in their custody. And detectives could have ordered a search warrant for K.T.’s metadata months ago.
“The state is sitting on stuff that — I don’t think anybody disagrees — is central to defendant’s theory of the case,” Stern said. “All I want is what the state has access to.”
Determining that access will now be left to the Oregon Supreme Court.
Defense attorney Zachary J. Stern, in this undated provided photo.
Courtesy of
Tech and the rights of the accused
Though they initially failed to make Meta produce its records, the Marion County judge later handed the defense attorneys a pair of victories: the phones of K.T. and Gonzalez Mendoza.
K.T., who had moved to Ohio, mailed her phone to the defense on the judge’s orders. Still, the lawyers’ scan came up as empty as the county’s, reinforcing claims about its indecipherable quality.
And whatever the defense has learned from Gonzalez Mendoza’s phone — if anything — has not yet been revealed in court records.
Yet they are once again making a run at Meta. In the process, they are posing far-reaching questions about Ayon-Urbano’s rights as a person charged with a crime.
His attorneys argue that valuable evidence may yet be out of their reach; and Meta’s servers are the last place to look. Stern said as much in a recent court hearing.
“The only way we can get this information is through Meta,” he told the Marion County judge. To deny his client a chance to search for evidence in Meta’s vast records is to deny him a fair trial, Stern said.
Meta, on the other hand, said the Stored Communications Act is a broad privacy protection that shields their data from the courts. Stern’s legal aim should stay focused on phones and their owners, one of their attorneys said, not the software giant.
“Just as any of us would with a diary locked under our bed in a box — you don’t subpoena the box," attorney Ryan Mrazik said.
It’s an argument that has prevailed numerous times across the country — and is still being fought.
On one hand, in 2019, the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals upheld Facebook’s refusal to provide the social media activity of a witness in a murder trial.
On the other, an appellate court in California has ordered Snap, Inc. — the parent company of Snapchat — and Meta to both provide digital records related to the murder trial of a man accused of killing his brother. That case is soon to go before the California Supreme Court.
The Oregon Supreme Court building is seen on the first day of the legislative session on Monday, Feb. 5, 2024, in Salem, Ore.
Jenny Kane / AP
Rian Peck, a Portland attorney who will argue Ayon-Urbano’s case before the Oregon Supreme Court, appears to be seeking a middle ground on privacy concerns. Peck said the subpoenaed data could be provided exclusively to a judge, who would then decide if it’s admissible.
The case has drawn attention beyond Oregon.
Legal experts and public defenders from across the country have filed motions supporting Ayon-Urbano’s claims. More and more, prosecutors rely on social media records to charge people, they said, but defense attorneys can only access public posts.
“If the defense lawyers do not get this evidence, no one will,” a group of law professors wrote in court filings.
State and federal prosecutors — who have recently been at odds numerous times during President Donald Trump’s second term — have both submitted briefs supporting Meta.
If Stern succeeds, the case could have ripple effects for criminal defense cases across the country.
Ayon-Urbano may need more than a victory in Oregon Supreme Court, however. There’s no guarantee the data and messages will affect his case.
Then again, they could save the 20-year-old from a life sentence.