IAPE Evidence Blog

CITIZEN-TIMES.COM, citizen-times.com
BYLINE: Romando Dixson

Asheville, NC

Com­pany has billed city about $130K

ASHEVILLE — A Police Depart­ment evi­dence room audit has cost the city about $130,000, keep­ing the project under bud­get so far.

The com­pany Blue­line Sys­tems & Ser­vices has scanned all high-risk items — money, firearms and nar­cotics — and could be within weeks of fin­ish­ing work, Blue­line direc­tor Mike Wright said.

City Coun­cil approved spend­ing up to $175,000 in money from drug seizures after a par­tial audit found police had lost track of at least 27 guns taken as evi­dence, along with drugs and cash.

Blue­line will send a report to Dis­trict Attor­ney Ron Moore and the State Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion when the work is done.

Wright said the dis­trict attor­ney, SBI and the city will deter­mine if addi­tional work is required, poten­tially adding costs.

“We are pos­si­bly near­ing the end of one phase,” said Wright, a for­mer crime scene ana­lyst with the Bun­combe County Sheriff’s Office. “If they elect to go on with it, it might go on some time longer. It depends on the dis­cus­sion of those parties.”

Blue­line Sys­tems is being paid an hourly rate for work that began in June, and some employ­ees are cost­ing the city $85 an hour. Since April, the com­pany also has billed the city for train­ing, media inter­views and meet­ings with attor­neys and police, which cost $120 an hour, accord­ing to invoices obtained by the Citizen-Times.

Moore in April ordered the evi­dence room sealed and that an inde­pen­dent audit be con­ducted after learn­ing about prob­lems uncov­ered by a par­tial audit.

He also requested an SBI inves­ti­ga­tion after an assis­tant dis­trict attor­ney and defense lawyer went to the evi­dence room in prepa­ra­tion for a case against a drug sus­pect and dis­cov­ered 397 pills of oxy­codone were miss­ing from an evi­dence envelope.

The dis­cov­ery prompted Moore to drop drug traf­fick­ing charges against the sus­pect. The par­tial audit found that of 1,097 items audited, 27 guns, 54 con­tain­ers of drugs and 34 pack­ets of money and valu­ables couldn’t be located.

Wright said he could not dis­cuss the results of his audit because of his con­tract with the city and the ongo­ing SBI investigation.

The Police Depart­ment is not updated on the sta­tus of the audit. The company’s reports go to Moore’s office and the SBI.

“APD won’t be noti­fied of the results of the audit until the DA and SBI are sat­is­fied that by reveal­ing the results of the audit, it won’t harm any poten­tial crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion,” police Capt. Tim Splain said.

Blue­line is still rec­on­cil­ing court sys­tem file num­bers and law enforce­ment file num­bers on some items.

Wright declined to say how many items have been scanned and counted but said the num­ber exceeds 14,000.

With the evi­dence room being sealed, police had to cre­ate another place to store prop­erty. They turned a SWAT bay, where vehi­cles are usu­ally kept, into a tem­po­rary prop­erty room.

Staff writer Jon Osten­dorff con­tributed to this article.

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

Post Pub­lish­ing Com­pany, Inc., salisburypost.com/
BYLINE: Nathan Hardin, nhardin@salisburypost.com
Link to Article

Sal­is­bury, NC

SALISBURY — A Sal­is­bury Police Depart­ment evi­dence cus­to­dian has been fired after an inves­ti­ga­tion “revealed pro­ce­dural and pol­icy vio­la­tions,” Chief Rory Collins said today in a press release.

Jef­frey Emer­son was placed on leave May 27 dur­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion into “alle­ga­tions of cash account­ing irreg­u­lar­i­ties within the department’s evi­dence stor­age area,” the press release said.

The release states that an inter­nal audit and inves­ti­ga­tion took place after Emer­son was placed on leave. The review was con­ducted by author­i­ties from out­side the Sal­is­bury Police Department.

In the state­ment, Collins wrote that the inves­ti­ga­tion “revealed pro­ce­dural and pol­icy violations.”

“As a result of these find­ings, Mr. Emerson’s employ­ment with the Sal­is­bury Police Depart­ment has been ter­mi­nated,” Collins wrote.

An SBI inves­ti­ga­tion to deter­mine whether there was any crim­i­nal wrong­do­ing in the case is ongo­ing, Collins said. That inves­ti­ga­tion was requested by Collins and Rowan County Dis­trict Attor­ney Brandy Cook.

Collins has pre­vi­ously declined to dis­cuss the amount of money missing.

Emer­son had been a civil­ian employee at the depart­ment since 1997. He was appointed to an evi­dence cus­to­dian posi­tion in 2006.

Collins said in the press release he would not com­ment fur­ther on the mat­ter at this time.

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

StarNewsOnline.com
BYLINE: Brian Freskos, Brian.Freskos@StarNewsOnline.com
Link to Article

Wilm­ing­ton, NC

Phylisha Del­laPia shows some of the steps that have to be taken when rpocess­ing evi­dence at the Wilm­ing­ton Police Depart­ment. Del­laPia and her co-workers process thou­sands of pieces of evi­dence every year at the depart­ment. Photo by Ken Blevins

Most law-abiding cit­i­zens never get to han­dle mar­i­juana by the pound, plas­tic bags filled with thou­sands of ecstasy pills, blood-stained cash and AK-47 assault rifles. But for Phylisha Del­laPia, this is just another day in the office.

As one of two tech­ni­cians work­ing in the Wilm­ing­ton Police Department’s prop­erty and evi­dence ware­house, Del­laPia knows the rest­ing place of some of the city’s last-surviving rem­nants of past crimes, in some cases, from decades ago. In many ways, the 6,060-square-foot repos­i­tory in the belly of police head­quar­ters is like a pri­vate museum that tes­ti­fies to Wilmington’s darker side. Police work, after all, is not always pleas­ant business.

On one area lies the .44 cal­iber Smith & Wes­son revolver that acci­den­tally shot Bran­don Lee, Bruce Lee’s son, dur­ing the 1993 film­ing of “The Crow” in Wilm­ing­ton. In another box sits clothes, track impres­sions and pho­tographs of the scene in April 1978 when Offi­cer James Nunalee Sr. was shot and killed in an ambush out­side a con­ve­nience store on Wrightsville Avenue. Fixed along shelf E are 29 con­tain­ers with evi­dence from the city’s cold case homi­cides, items detec­tives occa­sion­ally sift through in hopes of solv­ing unan­swered cases.

These moments of Wilmington’s his­tory, told by the evi­dence that sits on those shelves, are part of what fas­ci­nates Del­laPia about her job. 

New evi­dence and recov­ered prop­erty pours into the ware­house daily, all with a story behind it. Most items are placed in heat-sealed plas­tic bags and handed to Del­laPia or her col­league, Casey Lud­lum, for stor­age. They mark each item with a bar code and store it on a shelf or on the ware­house floor, where it will stay until a case has been adju­di­cated or, in cases of found prop­erty, some­one claims it.

Cold case evi­dence, how­ever, must be kept indef­i­nitely if it con­tains poten­tial DNA.

Seized cash is only briefly kept at the depart­ment before it is deposited in a bank account. Once the case is wrapped up in court, the money is typ­i­cally trans­ferred to the local school board.

Crim­i­nal case evi­dence housed in the department’s ware­house runs the gamut from machetes and golf clubs used in assaults to pirated DVDs. Last year alone, tech­ni­cians processed 11,778 pieces of evi­dence and prop­erty, or about 981 items per month.

One box sched­uled for incin­er­a­tion later this year con­tains about 2,000 clear plas­tic balls that you can get out of a vend­ing machine at most gro­cery stores for a quar­ter. The only dif­fer­ence is that instead of a cheap plas­tic toy inside, the balls con­tained mar­i­juana, part of a drug dis­tri­b­u­tion oper­a­tion police squashed in 2008.

“This was a vice oper­a­tion,” Del­laPia said, lay­ing down a clear bag filled halfway with dark mar­i­juana seeds on the table where offi­cers pack­age their evi­dence for safekeeping.

Given the nature of what the depart­ment keeps locked in this room, offi­cials are reluc­tant to dis­cuss what kind of secu­rity fea­tures keep it pro­tected. But it might suf­fice to say that since the ware­house is inside the police depart­ment, it is sur­rounded by armed cops all hours of the day. 

It comes as lit­tle sur­prise that the tech­ni­cians, some of the few peo­ple with direct access the evi­dence, are put through a rig­or­ous screen­ing process – the depart­ment even checks their credit rat­ing – to make sure they abide by the utmost in ethics. There still exist numer­ous checks, like unan­nounced audits and over­sight from inter­nal affairs.

Progress made

Wilm­ing­ton has come a long way in the man­ner in which it pre­serves evi­dence. Prior to mov­ing into its cur­rent facil­ity in 2006, offi­cers worked out of an old rail­road build­ing turned makeshift police sta­tion on Red Cross Street. The evi­dence and prop­erty ware­house sat in what was essen­tially a base­ment never designed to house such vast amounts of sen­si­tive mate­r­ial. The result was dis­ar­ray, with boxes strewn about with lit­tle sem­blance of order.

“Stuff was every­where,” recalled Det. Lee Odham, who has served in the depart­ment for nearly 12 years.

When the police depart­ment moved to its cur­rent loca­tion on Bess Street, Del­laPia faced the daunt­ing task of restor­ing a sense of orga­ni­za­tion. She rid­ded the ware­house of evi­dence no longer needed, helped estab­lish a track­ing sys­tem so offi­cers could more effi­ciently locate items and stream­lined the paper­work process.

“She must be an angel from heaven,” Police Chief Ralph Evan­gelous said. “What is usu­ally a night­mare and an admin­is­tra­tive headache has turned into a well-run entity.”

Now, offi­cers like Odham can eas­ily pull up cases they want to re-examine. Recently, Odham paid a visit to the ware­house in order to comb through evi­dence in the case of Bar­bara Lewis, a woman stran­gled to death in 1977 and dumped in a park­ing lot in the 800 block of Princess Street. Given peren­nial advance­ments in DNA col­lec­tion, Odham scours these cases for any­thing that could be tested with new technology.

“There’s always some­thing, we just have to fig­ure out what it is and what it’s on,” he said. 

Not all police department’s oper­ate like Wilmington’s. Del­laPia, who was recently named pres­i­dent of the N.C. Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence, has lever­aged what she has learned to advo­cate for prop­erty and evi­dence rooms statewide, par­tic­u­larly to adopt uni­form stan­dards for sub­mit­ting and stor­ing evi­dence. And she has openly called for tech­ni­cians to be cer­ti­fied by some inde­pen­dent author­ity, a process not cur­rently required.

For Del­laPia, a jaunty, 41-year-old Car­olina native who stud­ied crim­i­nal jus­tice at Cape Fear Com­mu­nity Col­lege and the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina Wilm­ing­ton, work­ing in the prop­erty room affords not only an oppor­tu­nity to learn about inter­est­ing cases but to act as a detec­tive herself.

Part of her job requires track­ing down the own­ers of lost or stolen prop­erty. One of her favorite suc­cess sto­ries is the case of five antique Zippo lighters. Using a name inscribed on one of the lighters, patent num­bers, prop­erty records and a will, she located the late owner’s sur­viv­ing fam­ily in another part of the state and got the items back to them.

“I like mak­ing sure peo­ple get their stuff back,” she said. “I like when the vic­tims come pick their prop­erty up and for them to have a good expe­ri­ence about their house or car get­ting bro­ken in to.”

Brian Freskos: 343‑2327

On Twit­ter: @BrianFreskos

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