This is stupid. He shouldn’t clbe charged unless they can prove that he destroyed evidence. If it was evidence, what was it?

Did they mistakenly erase the phone trying to unlock it, or did it erase itself when he didn’t log in for a certain period of time? Like obviously if he was in custody, he either knew he was going to be detained and erased it beforehand (unlikely) or they messed up and ran afoul of good tech privacy practices and are big mad about it.