Anonymous ID: d0a385 Dec. 14, 2022, 9:27 p.m. No.17945346   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>5377 >>5522 >>5772

‘Nightmare’ Warehouse Fire Erases Evidence in Many Unsolved Cases

Lawyers say evidence in cold cases and bids for exoneration disappeared or was ruined when a Police Department storage facility in Brooklyn went up in flames.

 

When a massive Police Department warehouse burned Tuesday, troves of evidence gathered over decades disappeared in a towering column of smoke or crumpled into soggy ruin, along with the possibility of justice in untold cases.

 

On Wednesday, debris scattered outside the Erie Basin Auto Pound, in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, could only hint at the legal significance of what was lost to the three-alarm blaze the day before. The waterfront compound had held everything from souped-up vehicles seized from reckless drivers to forensic fibers from decades-old murders and cold cases.

 

Now soggy, crumpled boxes bearing fragments of bar codes slumped onto fire-hose-flooded streets. The sooty wreckage included a mélange of sneakers, basketball jerseys and women’s blouses, along with an array of fishnet stockings, panties and bras. Small plastic cylinders containing genetic material lay melted, or broken open and submerged in dirty water.

 

Officials were still trying to determine how many criminal cases would be affected, but it was clear that the ramifications would be significant.

 

In addition to the property damage, the fire may have destroyed “the hopes and dreams of uncounted innocent people,” said the civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby, who was unsure whether any of his clients’ evidence had been in the warehouse.

 

Fire officials said everything inside was either lost or damaged. Police officials on Tuesday said the storage center contained items like sensitive DNA evidence from burglaries and shootings, as well as vehicles, motorbikes and e-bikes.

 

Standing in front of the still-smoldering compound on Tuesday, Jeffrey Maddrey, the Police Department’s acting chief of department, told reporters that the Erie Basin warehouse had housed sensitive DNA material, as well as evidence from past burglaries and shootings, but that it had not stored rape kits, which contain genetic material for sexual assault cases.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/14/nyregion/police-warehouse-fire-evidence.html

Anonymous ID: d0a385 Dec. 14, 2022, 9:30 p.m. No.17945367   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>5413 >>5522 >>5772

30 years worth of evidence, including DNA, possibly destroyed in NYPD storage facility blaze

 

Evidence, including DNA and items collected from crime scenes, dating back up to 30 years may have been destroyed in a 3-alarm fire that overtook a New York City Police Department storage facility in Brooklyn. Eight people suffered minor injuries, fire officials said.

 

The blaze erupted around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Erie Basin Auto Pound, a facility in Brooklyn's Red Hook neighborhood where the NYPD stores evidence, FDNY Chief of Department John Hodgens said in a press conference.

 

According to NYPD Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, the building was a police department pound that stored "a lot of biological evidence" as well as e-bikes and cars.

 

"DNA, things from past crimes, burglaries, shooting incidents, we have some biological evidence here as well," Maddrey said at the press conference. "It's mainly evidence, but we store other things there as well."

 

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nypd-evidence-fire-brooklyn-erie-basin-auto-pound/