Ex-BP Engineer Who Deleted Texts Heads To Trial

On Aug. 20, 2011, Mix is said to have deleted dozens of text messages that he had exchanged with a BP contractor named Wilson Arabie. The indictment says Mix also deleted one voicemail from Arabie, one voicemail from the supervisor and one voicemail from an unidentified caller that went through BP's general switchboard.

Two days later, Mix met with the vendor and turned over his iPhone to be imaged. That same day, he also is said to have told BP attorneys that he had deleted some text messages and voicemails from the phone, including texts related to the Macondo well, according to the indictment.

The supervisor, Jonathan Sprague, and Arabie worked with Mix on spill response efforts, prosecutors noted.

"The timing of these deletions provides compelling evidence of (Mix's) corrupt intent to prevent the discovery of his text messages with the Supervisor and Contractor," they wrote in a court filing.

Mix's attorneys, however, said prosecutors never presented the grand jury with evidence about the content of the deleted text messages.

"And had the grand jurors been given copies of the deleted text messages, they would have seen that they were not only not incriminatory in any way, but predominantly — and arguably entirely — innocuous and insignificant in substance," they wrote.

"The vast majority of the text messages involve the type of mundane exchanges one would expect to find between co-workers (e.g., 'Call you after I eat'; 'have u set the time for meeting tmrw?'; where are u sitting?')," they wrote.


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