IAPE Evidence Blog

Patch.org, Napa­P­atch, napa.patch.com
BYLINE: Mar­sha Dor­gan
Link to Article

Napa, CA

Inside the climate-controlled room where police store crime-scene evi­dence and items of value found around town.

Com­mu­nity ser­vice offi­cer Cindy Hood runs the prop­erty and evi­dence room at the City of Napa Police Depart­ment. Credit Mar­sha Dorgan

Walk into Cindy Hood’s office and you’re likely to detect a faint odor of mar­i­juana. A few steps from her desk is an arse­nal of weapons: every­thing from an assault weapon to a hand­gun to a sword and even some deac­ti­vated hand grenades.

At one time, Hood had to work her way past a spa, a kitchen stove and a mas­sive tele­vi­sion that were tak­ing up valu­able space around her desk.

Hood, who has been with the Napa Police Depart­ment for more than 20 years, is the com­mu­nity ser­vice offi­cer in charge of the prop­erty and evi­dence room in the base­ment of the department’s offices on First Street in down­town Napa.

The climate-controlled room is crammed with boxes and bags of evi­dence recov­ered by inves­ti­ga­tors from a crime scene. This is also the stor­age spot for items of value found by police offi­cers or the public.

Drugs des­tined to be burned, guns restored to own­ers or melted down

Mar­i­juana, heroin and metham­phet­a­mine, with drug para­pher­na­lia such as pipes, syringes and scales, are kept under lock and key until the crim­i­nal cases are con­cluded and the dis­trict attor­ney releases the evidence.

Then the drugs are incinerated.

“I can’t for obvi­ous rea­sons release the loca­tion,” Hood said. “Offi­cers have to stand there and make sure all of the drugs com­pletely burn.”

Firearms no longer needed as evi­dence are sent to a Bay Area foundry where they are melted down for sewer pipe.

“Most of the stolen guns are retrieved: Own­ers usu­ally have the ser­ial num­ber, which proves own­er­ship,” Hood said.

Com­put­ers line two walls in the evi­dence room. If a com­puter is con­fis­cated in a search war­rant or part of a crim­i­nal case, its owner may down­load cer­tain items with per­mis­sion from the dis­trict attorney’s office, Hood said.

A cor­ner of the room is set aside for evi­dence col­lected from sex­ual assault crimes.

“We have to give them a larger area because the evi­dence can be bed­ding, pil­lows and other bulky items,” Hood said, point­ing to a child car seat.

Bikes and own­ers are hard to reunite

Even bulkier are the many stolen and con­fis­cated bicy­cles stored in a shed behind the police department.

“Most of them are found bikes. Some are evi­dence and oth­ers are being held for safe­keep­ing, such as if a per­son is arrested while rid­ing a bike, we keep it here for 90 days,” Hood said.

Found bikes are the hard­est items to reunite with their own­ers, said retired Napa police offi­cer Bob Van Wormer, Hood’s one helper in the prop­erty and evi­dence room.

“We can ID the owner through the bike’s ser­ial num­ber, how­ever, many peo­ple don’t keep track of that kind of stuff. Only about 10 per­cent of the bikes are recov­ered by the own­ers,” Van Wormer said.

If a per­son turns in a found bike, and police can­not find the owner, the finder may claim the bike, he said. After 90 days, unclaimed bikes are auc­tioned off.

Body flu­ids kept in con­trolled cold storage

Sev­eral freez­ers and refrig­er­a­tors lin­ing a back wall con­tain sealed plas­tic bags of blood and urine.

“The blood and urine sam­ples are kept in dif­fer­ent freez­ers,” Hood said. “We have to be extremely care­ful to not cross-contaminate the evi­dence while han­dling it.”

If the tem­per­a­ture fluc­tu­ates in a refrig­er­a­tor or freezer, “an alarm goes off to let us know,” Hood said.

The spec­i­mens are sent to the state Depart­ment of Jus­tice where they are processed and tested, she said.

Most evi­dence is kept until the crim­i­nal case is con­cluded and the appeal process is fin­ished. How­ever, homi­cide evi­dence must be kept for 99 years, Hood added.

Evi­dence is released only by order from the Napa County Dis­trict Attorney’s Office or the courts.

Dis­card­ing (purg­ing) found prop­erty is an ongo­ing process, said Shirley Perkins of Napa Police Admin­is­tra­tive Services.

“We do every­thing pos­si­ble to find the own­ers. If we know who they are, we write them let­ters,” she said. “We have even returned prop­erty to peo­ple who are incarcerated.”

Hood couldn’t said she recall any par­tic­u­lar “weird” items she has encoun­tered through­out the years.

“I was going through a sack once and a plas­tic skele­ton popped up. It really star­tled me,” she said.

A clutch of deac­ti­vated hand grenades in the Napa Police Depart­ment prop­erty and evi­dence room. Credit Mar­sha Dor­gan
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Retired Napa police offi­cer Bob Van Wormer among the many bicy­cles in police stor­age. Credit Mar­sha Dor­gan
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

Cal­gary 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)
 
 

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org

10WALB, walb.com
BYLINE: Jade Bulecza, jade.bulecza@walb.com
Link to Article

Lown­des County, GA

Val­dosta, Georgia -

Lown­des County deputies had to scram­ble to pro­tect drugs and other evi­dence that’s nor­mally safely locked away in an evi­dence room.

That’s because a man acci­den­tally crashed his truck into the room.

That dri­ver, Ivey Star­ling, is still in the hospital.

This truck rammed into the wall at the sheriff’s office around noon.

72 year old Ivey Star­ling took his son Ivey Star­ling Jr. to the sheriff’s office to get his truck that was stolen over the week­end. Inves­ti­ga­tors say it shook the building.

“I was in my office talk­ing to some­one and all the sud­den a big boom and our alarm went off and I ran out and the truck was in the build­ing,” said Capt. Wanda Edwards.

“For unknown rea­sons he hit the accel­er­a­tor and come the con­crete curb­ing here and struck the wall,” said Trooper Jeremy Kinsey.

As you can see there’s dam­age here on the out­side and inside the walls have shifted and even the air con­di­tion­ing unit that cools Sher­iff Prine’s office has also been damaged.

Joseph Gif­ford is accused of steal­ing Ivey Star­ling Junior’s truck around mid­night from his home. Gif­ford was arrested on Williams School Road Mon­day morning.

County offi­cials were work­ing on a short term solu­tion to secure the area as they assess the damage.

“It’s actu­ally our evi­dence room where we keep our evi­dence store drugs and drug para­pher­na­lia such as that,” said Sher­iff Chris Prine.

“We’re going to come up with some kind of block­ing to cover the hole up,” said Chad McLeod, the Lown­des County project manager.

Troop­ers are still inves­ti­gat­ing what caused Star­ling to crash. 

- — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — - — -
Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org