Police blunder sends over $31k in cash to landfill
The good news, the two Somerville police officers realized Wednesday, as they stared up at a mountain of industrial trash at a New Hampshire landfill, was that they were sure they had found the location of $31,535 in seized cash that had been mistakenly thrown out inside a broken modular desk drawer.
The bad news was that it was buried under hundreds of tons of super-dense, hydraulically compacted waste and there was no way to get to it, even with heavy equipment, although it was only a few hundred feet away.
''A very bad mistake," Acting Police Chief Robert Bradley said in a statement issued on behalf of the Somerville Police Department and the city.
''I was hoping we were going to be able to dig it out," Bradley said in a telephone interview yesterday. ''But it's gone. We'll never get it. Even if it was a body, we wouldn't be able to get it."
What is less certain is whether any pending cases have been compromised. Somerville police are working with the Middlesex district attorney's office to determine the extent of the damage. Bradley said the department still has the drug evidence seized in many of the cases where cash was seized.
Bradley said that the mistaken housecleaning resulted from an overzealous effort to clean up and modernize the evidence storage area inside the department's dilapidated Washington Street headquarters.
''It was accidental," but the officers cleaning the evidence room ''should have been more careful than that," he said. ''It's just an embarrassment for the department."
The department recently received a federal grant for a computerized evidence-tracking system, and two officers were assigned to clean up and inventory the room's contents in preparation for its installation, city officials said.
Evidence no longer needed is returned to owners, auctioned off, or discarded. But Somerville police had not tracked all the items carefully, and ''the amount of material stored in the evidence room had grown so much in recent years that we'd had to expand into additional secure space, so we were determined to get the room cleaned, sorted, and organized in advance of deploying our new record-keeping system," Bradley said.
An evidence clerk began locking seized cash in the drawer unit in January, even though it was broken and not attached to the other officers' furniture, Bradley said.
Bradley said yesterday that city officials determined that no drugs were in the drawers.
On Monday, two officers assigned to the cleanup found the drawer unit leaning on its side and assumed it belonged in a dumpster with other office furniture being discarded. The evidence clerk who was using the drawer unit was not working Monday, Bradley said.
When the mistake was discovered Tuesday, police officials tracked the dumpster to a
Waste Management officials could not be reached for comment yesterday.
Landfill officials said there was no way to dig out the money, even with their heavy equipment.
''We're just going to have to move on and deal with the aftermath," he said.
Emily LaGrassa, spokeswoman for Middlesex District Attorney Martha Coakley, said that prosecutors were aware of the incident, but had not begun to take an active role in the investigation.
Bradley also said that the department was conducting an internal probe to determine whether any disciplinary action was appropriate.
But since the incident began with good intentions, he said, ''it's not the sort of thing where anyone is going to lose their job."
''Someone told me years ago when I first became a cop that, if you don't do anything, you can't get in trouble," Bradley said. ''It's when you start trying to do things when the problems start."
