Remember all that legal head-butting and posturing last year when the feds tried to force Apple to help it break into San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone? It ended with a whimper when the FBI found another way into the phone.

Now law enforcement appears ready for Round Two.

On Sunday November 5 Devin Kelley walked into a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and murdered 26 people. He was then shot dead by police. The FBI wants to get into Kelley’s iPhone to find out if he’s got links to militant groups or was just a lone wacko.

The day after the shooting, Chris Combs of the FBI (which is helping the Texas Rangers in the investigation) was on TV complaining that consumer smartphones are just too darn secure to break into. He wouldn’t say what kind of smartphone Kelley owned, only that the FBI sent Kelley’s phone out to its forensics lab in Virginia, which would try to obtain its contents.

Next, we hear that the Rangers have served Apple with a search warrant (dated November 9) demanding access to Kelley’s iPhone SE. Apparently the forensics lab scientists couldn’t break into it. The warrant requests the files on shooter Kelley’s iPhone SE and in his iCloud account (if one exists). According to reports, it also requests the files in a second phone used by Kelley–a cheap phone made by a completely different phone maker (LG)!

There’s plenty of irony to go around here.

First of all, law enforcement probably had the chance to unlock Kelley’s phone using the fingerprint off of Kelley’s cold, dead hand. They had 48 hours to do that before the phone would have required a passcode log-in. They might have known this had they bothered to call Apple for help.