This regular feature of The Evidence Log is to keep you alert and to learn from mistakes that others have made. It also will give you material that demonstrates to administrators the critical importance of property management, and should help to convince them that inattention to property matters can cost them their jobs.

The Detroit News
By David G. Grant November 21, 2000
Police detonate bomb still in evidence locker

Officers on Monday exploded a bomb checked into a Police Headquarters evidence cabinet over the weekend. The blast left a six inch hole in the wooden cabinet, which held property confiscated from crime scenes. More than 75 officers and civilian personnel were evacuated from the building, police said.

"This was definitely a explosive device," said the head of the department's Homicide Section. "Since we did not know how powerful the device was, it was exploded inside the wood cabinet."

He said the device was brought into the Homicide Section Saturday morning by members of the department's evidence section, who had picked up several items from the scene of a murder inside a home. Police found the bomb and drugs in the house.
 

San Antonio Express News
By Bonnie Pfister January 15,2001
Ax murders still unresolved 10 years later

Thursday marks a decade since the Laredo ax murders of three men, but various aspects of the gruesome case, in which two teenagers were charged with murder amid talk of Satan worship and drug abuse, remain unresolved.

One youth, then 16, was identified by another youth as the alleged instigator of the bloody attacks, but he has yet to be tried. Another youth, then 17, testified that he supplied the weapons to the other two and drove them within a block of the home where his passengers said they intended to "trash a house".

Only a third youth has faced a jury: he was 17 at the time of the crime. In a 1992 trial that lasted just one week, he was convicted of murder and became the youngest person ever on Texas' death row.

Problems in future prosecutions include an accusation that a County serologist perjured himself in claiming the blood on the murder weapons matched those on the victims. In fact, it appeared that the ax had never been tested.

In addition, the district attorney's office acknowledged that critical evidence, the double-headed ax which was the key weapon, had been taken from the evidence room and used to trim a Christmas tree the year after the murder.
 

The Associated Press
March 3, 2001
Gold and gems disappear from police evidence room

Chicago - About $16,000 in jewelry stolen from a widow and recovered by police is missing again - this time from the police evidence storage room. When police recovered her jewels, she was so happy, she wrote a letter praising the work of one police officer.

But her praise turned to dismay when she went to reclaim her rings, tennis bracelets and a necklace, only to find they were missing from the Police Department's evidence warehouse. "I can't believe they lost it," Hesseltine, 64, said. "This is amazing." Police officials say they don't know whether the jewels were stolen by an employee in the Evidence and Recovered Property Section, or simply misplaced because of the unit's move to another facility.