A grieving father has emailed Apple begging the company to unlock his son's iPhone.
"Don't deny me the memories of my son," Leonardo Fabbretti, wrote.
According to AFP, the Italian man will approach hackers in San Francisco, who reportedly aided the FBI in the San Bernardino case, if the tech company refuse to help.
Fabbretti's son, Dama, was diagnosed with bone cancer in 2013.
He died age 13.
"I cannot give up. Having lost my Dama," he wrote in a letter, which he sent on March 21.
"I will fight to have the last two months of photos, thoughts and words which are held hostage in his phone,"
"I had given my son an iPhone 6 nearly nine months before his death, which he used all the time."
Fabbretti told AFP that the Israeli firm, Cellebrite, has already offered to unlock the iPhone for free.
While Apple is yet to respond to the request publicly, Tim Cook has explicitly said in the past that unlocking phones could set a dangerous precedent.
Earlier this month, he told Time: "No one should have a key that turns a billion locks. It shouldn’t exist.
"No one should have the message content for all of these messages. You wouldn’t want it all in one place.
"I think it would be very bad for security and privacy.
"If I know what your messages are, if I can read those, I’ll probably be able to conclude where you’re going, who you’re with, the location the message was sent."