A Fresno cellphone repair company being sued over allegations that a technician sent intimate videos of a teenage girl from her iPhone says it now requires criminal background checks for new hires and has overhauled how it handles customer devices.
The lawsuit, filed in Fresno County Superior Court, alleges that technician Desmond Devon Fitzgerald was facing felony charges from a 2023 undercover child sex sting when he serviced the 17-year-old’s phone in May.
Defendants include CellPros LLC; CellPros-Cedar LLC; Antony Ayodele, owner of CellPros; two other owners; and Fitzgerald.
Company response
“Cellpros had no prior knowledge of Mr. Fitzgerald’s pending legal matters outside of work at the time of his employment,” a company representative said in a written statement. The statement said the company’s screening at the time “focused on direct professional reference and prior employer verifications.”
The company said it fired Fitzgerald for cause after learning of the incident, banned him from its stores and cooperated with law enforcement. It also said it had no prior history of customer data privacy complaints.
The company said it now requires federal, state, county and sex offender registry checks for all prospective employees, and has begun a background audit of current staff. It said it has also switched to charging docks that cannot transfer data, required two employees to handle device storage, limited when it collects passcodes and added cameras at workbenches at all of its stores. CellPros lists three Fresno locations on its website.
The company said it could not comment on specifics of the lawsuit.
In an interview with The Fresno Bee, Fitzgerald denied the charges — both from 2023 and in the CellPros lawsuit.
The allegations
According to the amended complaint, dated Sept. 22, the girl’s iPhone 11 was left at CellPros May 16 for a battery repair. Fitzgerald was assigned to the phone at the store at 5211 E. Kings Canyon Road, and the repair was completed about 2:04 p.m.
At about 2:44 p.m., while the phone was still at the shop, two intimate videos of the girl were sent from it to two phone numbers without her consent, the complaint alleges. Fitzgerald later admitted by text to her father that one of the numbers was his, according to the complaint.
The girl was at home on her laptop, which was connected to the same iCloud account as her phone, when she saw that two messages had just been sent from her phone, Germain Labat, the plaintiff’s attorney, said in a news release. She texted “WTF” to the message thread, and Fitzgerald messaged back, “Please don’t text this number,” according to Labat.
The complaint states that message was sent about 2:57 p.m. It was later deleted from the phone but had already synced through her iCloud account to another device. Her father picked up the phone at the store about 3:15 p.m.
The complaint states that public reporting identified Fitzgerald as one of those arrested in Operation Boogeyman. In that October 2023 operation, detectives posed as preteen and early teenage boys and girls, according to the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office. The lawsuit states his criminal case remained active at the time of the repair.
The suit alleges that information “was publicly available to everyone, including CELLPROS.” It also alleges that the company failed to adequately screen, supervise or terminate Fitzgerald.
