Archive for the 'I've Got Something' Category
Evidence vault holds it all
November 13, 2011Calgary Sun, cnews.canoe.ca
BYLINE: Nadia Moharib, Calgary Sun
Link to Article
Calgary, AB, Canada

Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility supervisor R.G. Hemlow among items stored at the facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. )(MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY
CALGARY — Found hot tubs, seized sex toys, the occasional body part and a pickled corn snake have been kept here over the years.
Right now, there are about 121,000 exhibits lining shelves and kept in fridges and freezers in the 85,000 sq-ft. facility housing everything from found bikes to crime-scene evidence.
While some are strange, others gross and several downright stinky, many ultimately are key to solving a crime, ideally seeing courtroom convictions, in cases from murders to muggings.
Exhibits aren’t simply stockpiled but meticulously filed, each piece given a bar code, before being put in its place for safekeeping.
For the most part, that is pretty much where the item will stay, (some kept forever,) painstakingly protected, until it goes to court, is destroyed or sent to auction.
The goal is to ensure the exhibit is not tampered with and proves a pristine piece of evidence, absolutely unaltered from how it was found, should it go to court.
“We are the gatekeepers,” says unit supervisor, R.G. Hemlow, one of 18 custodians at the warehouse.
“We are the continuity kings.”
Even police officers require escorts here and it’s not uncommon for veteran visitors to slip hands safely into pockets to prevent a fingerprint from inadvertently landing somewhere suspicious.
Cleaning staff undergo security checks and are fingerprinted, photographed and undergo a polygraph.
“It smells in there,” Hemlow warns before offering a tour and detailing what is kept inside.
“There is stuff in there from cigarette butts to DNA and guns and there are screw drivers and bodily fluids.”
On a slow day staff take in about 150 new exhibits while a busy one can see up to 500.
The annual intake has gone from nearly 70,000 in 2007 to 107,865 in 2010.
But very few exhibits actually have their day in court.
“Police officers are thorough,” Staff Sgt. Gord Eiriksson who oversees the unit explains.
“If they have a file where they are not sure whether to take the sofa — they’ll take the sofa.
“Of all the exhibits, really only one percent will see a court room.”
There is no downplaying, however, the potential value of those which do.
“People can end up going to jail for life because of what we have in here,” he says.
Everything is carefully categorized before being filed in an electronic database and each and every movement of any exhibit, even if simply relocated from one shelf to anther, is documented.
There are pop cans fashioned into secret drug caches, weapons and a creepy musical doll seized in a fraud investigation where a woman allegedly went door-to-door with a sob story selling the items which were likely stolen.
“You name something and we’ve had it,” Hemlow says.
“I’ve had complete fuel tanks, brand new fridges, a complete semi full of appliances and a hot tub,” he says still befuddled at the latter exhibit.
“I just can’t believe anyone has lost a hot tub — we could use a hot tub in here,” he jokes.
A custodian — more typically tasked with finding rightful owners of bikes, wallets and purses — shakes his head at the prospect of tracking down the owner of a bent and battered shovel recently turned in to police.
“Some citizen took the time to turn it in,” he shrugs.
“I’ll do my best.”
About 200 bikes come into the unit a month, kept for 30 days bikes before going up for auction.
About 300 in any given year are refurbished by prisoners at the Calgary Correctional Centre for the Calgary Kiwanis to give away.
“I have to keep these moving,” the custodian says pointing to neat rows of bicycles, and stressing his job would be easier if people took time to report thefts to police.
“I have really, really high end bikes in here that no one has reported as stolen .. everything belongs to somebody, it’s our job to do our due diligence” to find them.
Boxes of licence plates, lost, never claimed or stolen, are cut into bits and destined for a shredder before being melted down for recycling.
Bottles and cans no longer needed to be kept are recycled with money going into city coffers while any clothing, which has second-hand potential, is given to charity.
Boxes of Lucky Beer, bloody clothing, computers seized as part of child pornography investigations, hub caps, bike helmets, broken glass, skateboards, lunch boxes and even moldy items tightly wrapped in plastic are stored on shelves where a posted sign mandates a 575-lb limit.
There are blood swabs in fridges, exhibits in freezers, rolls of copper wire, ski poles and newspaper boxes all taken in as part of criminal investigations in other parts of the warehouse.
Staff are on call should temperature in the walk-in refrigerator dip too low, surge too high or in the case of a power surge — all potentially jeopardizing the integrity of exhibits ranging from DNA to urine and semen.
“It’s pretty disturbing,” Hemlow says, his breath visible, as he points to shelf after shelf lined with sex kits.
“All that is sex assaults.
“I amazes me, it baffles my mind,” he says of the sheer volume of exhibits.
“And it’s ongoing.”
Work isn’t simply confined to the warehouse.
Custodians often work with police green teams, suiting up in hazmat outfits to tear down marijuana grow ops.
They bag plants in the illicit operations, seizures later audited before paperwork is sent off to Ottawa.
A ‘Please Keep Off The Grass,’ sign hangs on the wall above several black bags containing a recent crop hauled in to the unit.
Soon it will all, literally, go up in smoke.
Custodians, escorted by the TAC team, cart plants to undisclosed rural locations where they are put in incinerators.
“We don’t leave until 30 minutes later,” Hemlow says.
And it’s a pile of dust when they are done.
A strong stomach is optional, but certainly a good asset for custodians to have.
And a thick skin doesn’t hurt either.
The first offers a defence to dealing with the actual “stinky stuff,” while the latter might insulate against tummy-turning, often heartbreaking, details associated to exhibits.
Over the years many would easily fit in the ‘gross’ or “utterly odd” category, including a fetus in a pizza box, a partially-dressed, headless mannequin staff dubbed ‘No-head Norman,’ and that pickled corn snake picked up in a Hells Angels’ file.
“Three or four months ago, an officer came in with a thumb in a jar and asked if we could dispose of it properly,” veteran custodian Todd Neis says matter-of-factly.
“Stuff like that doesn’t bother me, the only thing that really does is just the smell of stuff, rotting stuff.”
A section where homicide exhibits are kept, including one dating back to the 1970s, is an area where many find it tough to ignore real-life, often life-ending, stories behind the exhibits.
“Some people say the hair on the back of their neck goes up, they just have an eerie feeling,” Hemlow says.
“You’ll see people in the news and you know what happened to that person, how they were killed — you see some of their pictures and you connect with the victims. It’s not just a name to us.”
It’s those type of exhibits, especially, which are a reminder this massive warehouse isn’t simply a storage facility — victims hoping on a courtroom coup often count on evidence kept here to make that happen.
“You would see the whole team crushed if we did something wrong,” Hemlow says.
“We don’t want to make a mistake.”
Being a small part of the pursuit of justice is rewarding, custodians keenly aware safeguarding exhibits helps put criminals away.
Recently, a man was convicted of raping a woman in her own home 25 years ago based largely on DNA.
For many years, file number 87019230 sat inside a walk-in freezer, filed beside more than 1,000 other so-called sex kits — ultimately leading to the conviction of James Parent a quarter-century later.
On the job for more than a dozen years, Neis, says seeing criminals held accountable never gets old — that conviction a prime example.
“We were happier than hell when he was found guilty,” he says.
“Everybody let out a big cheer.”
“Sometimes we get to see there’s a ‘guilty,’ that’s deserved and we get that smile,” Hemlow adds.
“It’s meaningful work.”
The weathered headstone with the name John T. Mitchell engraved on it is among many mysteries at the property unit, staff trying to find out where it belongs.
“We’ve had a couple of urns full of ashes,” Neis says.
“A fisherman reeled one in on the end of his fishing rod, a wooden urn which had a guy’s first name on it.”
While some exhibits literally embody the smell of death, others brim with life.
“We actually had a bird in lost and found and held it until someone picked it up,” Neis says.
Several years ago, a rat crawled out of a backpack, he says, and “we had a corn snake in a pickled jar which kind of freaked people out.
“I’m not sure about the story with that.”

Racks and racks of evidence in the Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)

Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility supervisor R.G. Hemlow among items stored at the facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)

Recovered bikes in the Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)

Assault evidence in the Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)

Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility supervisor R.G. Hemlow with some of the odd items stored at the facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)

Metal, including weapons, chopped up to go to recycling in the Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)

Racks and racks of evidence in the Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)

Bags of pot waiting to be destroyed in the Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)

Homicide section among the racks and racks of evidence in the Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)

Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility supervisor R.G. Hemlow among items stored at the facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. These items are all from a single seizure of stolen goods. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)

Metal chopped up to go to recycling in the Calgary Police Service evidence storage facility in Calgary, Alberta, on November 12, 2011. (MIKE DREW/QMI AGENCY)
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International Association for Property and Evidence
“Law Enforcement Serving the Needs of Law Enforcement”
www.IAPE.org
Evidence in criminal cases requires extra care
August 13, 2011News Herald, newsherald.com
BYLINE: CHRIS SEGAL / News Herald Writer
Link to Article
Bay County, FL

Bay County Sheriff’s Office Crime Scene Investigator Chris Reynolds takes fingerprints from a piece of paper in Lynn Haven Wednesday. TERRY BARNER / The News Herald
PANAMA CITY — There’s a secret basement downtown full of drugs and murder weapons. It’s down a flight of stairs, past an old, out-of-place painting of a landscape and through a door with two locks that no one person holds both keys to.
The fridge in the back of the room keeps the DNA fresh. Dozens of pistols and rifles, a bow, some arrows and at least one samurai sword are there.
It’s the clerk of court’s evidence vault, and it’s the last stop before destruction for the evidence used to convict criminals in Bay County.
“There’s more paperwork than anything else,” Donna Fowler said. “Really it’s just a basement with a bunch of junk.”
Fowler is the criminal department manager at the clerk’s office. She doesn’t go into the basement. It’s kind of scary and the drugs languishing there contribute to a funky odor.
In Lynn Haven, the evidence locker at the Bay County Sheriff’s Office is arranged by crimes. Evidence over here pertains to violent crimes. Those stereos and video games are burglaries or robberies.
The back of the room smells considerably fresher than the clerk’s vault. This must be evidence from drug cases – yep, there’s a pound of dope right there. Several pounds maybe. That sack could definitely hold several pounds. There’s a whole marijuana plant actually.
In many Bay County criminal cases, this is the first stop for the evidence that will be used in prosecutions. Roughly 13,000 pieces of evidence in more than 35,000 criminal cases pass through this room each year, said Investigator Shannon Mitchell, one of four crime scene investigators and technicians who work back here.
When deputies collect evidence, they bring it here, where it is logged into the system, packaged, sealed and labeled. There are rows and rows of rifles, dozens of pistols hanging from the walls. Some of this stuff, like the muzzle-loader rifle there, looks like it’s been here since the civil war.
BSCO’s locker has a fridge that contains maggots from a death case. There’s a new machine that allows the CSIs to use superglue to recover fingerprints. It’s actually just like those detective shows, but slower, Mitchell said. There’s a machine for bloody clothes, which need to dry before they can be packaged and sealed.
Evidence of a crime must be saved for years. A case doesn’t end just because someone’s been convicted of a crime. The evidence can’t just be tossed out when someone’s locked up. The appeals process can last for years, especially in murder cases. A conviction overturned may call for a new trial, so there’s always the off-chance that evidence will be needed again.
“These guys are really awesome at what they do,” Sheriff Frank McKeithen said during a brief visit to the lab. “Getting it is just a part of it. It’s what they do with it that counts.”
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International Association for Property and Evidence
“Law Enforcement Serving the Needs of Law Enforcement”
www.IAPE.org
Stolen lawn ornaments wind up in Westminster resident’s yard
August 1, 2011Carroll County Times, carrollcountytimes.com
BYLINE: Carrie Ann Knauer, Times Staff Writer
Link to Article
Westminster, MD

A strange surprise: About 20 stolen lawn ornaments were placed in Rebecca Hale’s Westminster yard overnight Saturday. SUBMITTED PHOTO
Rebecca Hale wants her neighbors to know she didn’t steal their lawn ornaments, even if they did end up in her yard Sunday morning.
Hale, who lives in the 200 block of Janice Way in Westminster, said she and her boyfriend Jonathan Chell left the house at 10 p.m. Saturday to go to a friend’s house and play cards. When they returned home at 5 a.m. Sunday, she almost couldn’t believe that she had pulled up to the right house.
“My driveway was lined with about 20 stolen lawn ornaments,” the 36-year-old said. “I thought to myself ‘It looks like somebody is about to have a yard sale.’”
There was a black wooden dog on a bench on her front porch, and a metal swan blocking the door. At the bottom of her steps were a family of bunnies to the right, she said, and to the left some angels and garden gnomes. One of the more significant pieces was a small cow statue that she estimated weighed more than 100 pounds.
“It was crazy,” she said. “I had a million thoughts going through my mind.”
Thinking it was possible that the lawn display could have been a prank by a friend, she waited for someone to speak up and take credit for it. When no one came forward, she called the Westminster police at 3 p.m. to report the display, which she assumed was of stolen goods.
A police officer came to check it out Sunday, she said, and on Monday, they sent a city dump truck to collect the goods and take them to the police department.
Westminster police Lt. Douglas Johnston said it appears most of the lawn decorations were stolen from the surrounding neighborhood. Eight of the objects have already been reclaimed by the owners, who had reported them as stolen, he said.
Johnston said the items are all intact, and have been placed in the department’s property room. Some people may not have noticed that they were stolen yet, he said, or may have noticed and not thought about reporting the theft.
Anyone in Westminster who had a lawn decoration stolen this weekend should contact the Westminster police at 410 – 848-4646 and ask for the property clerk, he said.
“We don’t get this occurring that often,” Johnston said. “More than likely, it was juveniles.”
Hale said she took lots of photos of the lawn display with her cellphone, and said she won’t soon forget the episode.
“It would be cool if everyone got their stuff back,” she said.
Reach staff writer Carrie Ann Knauer at 410 – 857-7874 or carrie.knauer@carrollcountytimes.com.
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International Association for Property and Evidence
“Law Enforcement Serving the Needs of Law Enforcement”
www.IAPE.org