Sept. 23 - Bidding on the abandoned contents of a storage locker is often a game of chance, sometimes producing valuable antiques, other times a pile of moldy clothes. One man who makes a living off such auctions had perhaps his most interesting find last Wednesday. After winning three large bins from one storage room, he opened them up and found five handguns; 30 police evidence bags containing cocaine, marijuana and heroin; a pile of money; and nearly 50 case files from a New Jersey Police Department. 

The man, who was not publicly identified, contacted his brother, a detective in a different county. Officials arrested the officer in question and charged him with official misconduct and receiving stolen property. He had rented the locker, but had fallen behind 
in his payments, so under state law the facility was allowed to auction the storage room's contents. 

The county prosecutor said the files and evidence were from the Police Department's internal affairs bureau and juvenile crime squad - two divisions the officer had worked in during his 18 years on the force. Authorities said they were combing through the files to determine if the cases were under the officer's purview. It was not immediately clear if any trials had been compromised. The county prosecutor ordered a complete audit of the Police Department's evidence room and a review of the officer's caseload. She said she did not know what the officer's motive might have been for hoarding the files, money and drugs. "Maybe he just didn't want to work," the prosecutor said.

A County Sheriff walked into his department's evidence room in the cramped fourth floor of the county courthouse last February to get some cocaine to use in a sting operation with the FBI. He couldn't find it. The disappearance of two packages of cocaine exposed the Sheriff's Department's inadequate procedures for handling narcotics: There were no procedures. 
The FBI and Texas Rangers are aiding a district attorney's office investigation of the incident, and a county grand jury is hearing evidence in the case. Since the investigation's start, the Sheriff's Department has hired an attorney to help write procedures for handling evidence and moved the evidence room from the courthouse to a more secure location. 

A former deputy sheriff in western Kentucky has reached a plea agreement with prosecutors after being charged with taking a gun from the sheriff's department's evidence room. The former deputy was charged with receiving stolen property and wanton endangerment in November after a man accidentally shot himself with the gun at a swap meet. Police said the former deputy had taken the 9 mm pistol to the fairgrounds with the intention of selling it. 

Police in a Tennessee city have arrested one of their evidence room employees, charging her with stealing more than 13-thousand dollars in cash. 

The thefts were discovered by other property room personnel and turned over to internal affairs. The evidence clerk had worked in the property and evidence room for less than a year. Authorities put internal controls into effect after a scandal in 2003 in which millions of dollars worth of cocaine and marijuana had been stolen by employees over several years. 

When the wife of a police sergeant called the County Sheriff's Office on May 17, 2004, she reported a find so mystifying that an Internal Affairs report would later call it "incomprehensible." 

She found a sealed package sent from a DNA laboratory in North Carolina to the sheriff's office. 

The package held critical DNA evidence - five hairs and a blood sample - connected to an unsolved murder that the officer had investigated. But his wife didn't find it in some evidence room, where it belonged. The package was at home, in a box, inside the master bedroom's walk-in closet. And she found it four years after it had been sent to the sheriff's office. 

After she called, the sheriff's office discovered that the sergeant had never booked the package into evidence. Confronted, he said, "I, I, I don't recall getting it," according to a sheriff's report. His bosses called it "deliberate misappropriation" of DNA evidence. They also learned he had checked out other evidence that is missing. 

The sergeant's actions -labeled "incompetent (or worse)" by the sheriff's office - may have cost authorities any chance of convicting someone for this murder, and opened the department to "severe criticism, the loss of public trust, and substantial civil liability," a top sheriff's official wrote. 

The story of the sergeant and the package found inside his closet has not been reported before. The Seattle Times came across it as part of an ongoing investigation of improperly sealed court files. Sheriff's officials declined to discuss details of their investigation, since the case is still open. They would not disclose results of the DNA testing done on the evidence found in the sergeant's closet.