FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 11, 2006

SOMERVILLE – Acting Police Chief Robert Bradley announced today that an error in a


project to clean out unneeded items and update record-keeping for the Police

Department’s evidence room has led to the inadvertent disposal of evidence or seized

property in several active cases – including $31,535 in seized funds. Bradley indicated

that he has already notified the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office of the error.

No drugs were included in the items thrown out in the incident.

“Everyone in the Department – myself most of all – understands the severity of this

error,” said Bradley. “Everything we know now points to human error rather than any

deliberate misdeed, but it’s still a very bad mistake. Because we’re talking in some

instances about seized property rather than actual evidence, this may not end up affecting

many cases, but that doesn’t excuse what happened.

“Perhaps the saddest thing about the whole episode is that these items were thrown out

because we were in the middle of cleaning up the evidence room and installing a new

automated record-keeping system for which we’d just received federal funding,” said

Bradley.

The seized property and evidence items, including the $31,000 in cash, had been

temporarily stored in the drawer of a detached portion of a metal desk located in a secure

room that formed part of the evidence storage area at police headquarters in the Public

Safety Building on Washington Street. The broken drawer unit was not in an office area

and was leaning on its side when it was mistakenly identified last Monday as junked

furniture and tossed into a dumpster for disposal.

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The cleanup was initiated at the request of Chief Bradley by Captain Charles Femino,

whose command includes the evidence room. “Items that we no longer need to preserve

for evidentiary purposes are supposed to cleaned out of the evidence room and either

returned to the owners, disposed of or auctioned off annually,” said Bradley. “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.”

Captain Femino hired two retired officers to assist him with the project, and maintained a

record of all the items thrown out in the cleanup. “Unfortunately, this piece of broken

furniture did not appear to be in use,” said Femino, “and the officer who knew that items

were stored in the drawer was not on duty on the day of the cleanup.

“On Tuesday morning, as soon as the evidence room officer informed us that she had

been using the drawer to store evidence and seized items, we immediately contacted the

waste disposal company and the landfill operator,” said Femino. “We dispatched two

officers to New Hampshire on Wednesday morning to inspect the site, and they

discovered that the contents of our dumpster had already been buried under hundred of

tons of industrially compacted trash. There’s no way to recover it, even with heavy

equipment. We know what it is and where it is, but we can’t get to it – and neither can

anybody else.”

“Obviously, our Office of Professional Standards will conduct a full review of this

incident.” said Bradley. “Only after we’ve completed that review will we be able to

assign responsibility and make a decision about whether there’s a need for disciplinary

action. In the meantime, it’s very important for the public to know that this error has no

effect on the integrity of the evidence system as it affects any other cases, past or

present.”

-END