Need help getting into a Note 5

[MoabFJ]

I am at my wits end.
I have a family member that ended their life recently. They did some odd things beforehand, and I would really like to figure out a few of these. The personal loss is enormous, and it would be helpful to clear a few things up.

We had each others fingerprint verification, as well as the same numerical lock, but both have been changed.
I tried to get someone locally to unlock the phone for me (SF Bay area) but was unable to find anyone to help. This includes Verizon and Samsung. Since the Samsung phone location app was not configured, they claim they have no other way.

A friend sent me a few workarounds which have likely made things worse. Since I have access to their Gmail, I was instructed to lock the phone and it would enable me to set a pass code. Unfortunately since there was already a pass code, it just locked the phone. There is no way to unlock the phone without the current pass code now.

This is where I am at today. I don't care about the phone at all, but the data may be the only way to figure out where their head was at these last few days. I would greatly appreciate any help at this point.

 

[amarie82]

If you know their Gmail go to a PC and login with their info! See if there are any lock screen bypass apps you can download that will get you in!

 

[MoabFJ]

I can get into the Gmail, but since the phone is locked I really don't see any other options listed.

 

[Hadron]

The "remotely set a password" thing has been that way for at least 5 years, but misunderstandings about it are sadly still commonplace. One of the problems with the Web is that it stores misinformation forever as well as the truth.

If they had the option to back up to Google servers turned on there may be information backed up to their Google Drive account. The question is, what could you do with it? If they have call or SMS backups there those will be XML files, things you can download, store, read into another device or app, even decipher just by looking at them in a text editor (though the formatting wouldn't be very easy). But the general app data backups would be a different matter - I suspect that the simplest way to access the data in them would be to restore them to a different phone, as in this tutorial. But if you go to their Google Drive in a browser you should at least be able to see whether there is a backup there (there's a "backups" section in the sidebar), and hence whether it's worth following this route. I believe Samsung have a similar service, but don't know much about it, and you don't mention knowing their Samsung login credentials (if any).

Note that I'm not suggesting that you reset the phone and try to restore it from that backup (if it exists). That might work, but all data not included in the backup will be lost permanently if you do that. You will find apps advertised online that claim to be able to recover data from a phone after a reset, but I've never seen any evidence that their claims are genuine, and if the phone storage is encrypted there is absolutely no way of recovering the data unless you can call in some favours from the NSA. So I would not try to get past the lock this way.