Original Blog Entry: Police send 123 bags of illegal drugs to store

truesee — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 02:42:10 GMT

Dallas police mistakenly send 123 bags of illegal drugs to store

7:33 AM CDT on Wednesday, March 17, 2010

SCOTT GOLDSTEIN

The Dallas Morning News

At the Dallas CityStore, customers can find affordable furniture, bikes, electronics and other merchandise from the police property room and other city departments.

But a city employee was recently surprised to stumble upon a different product: 123 bags of illegal drugs mistakenly shipped over in a file cabinet by the Dallas Police Department Property Unit.

It was a terrible oversight, said Sgt. Warren Mitchell, a department spokesman. We're going to see where we went wrong and try to fix that problem.

The discovery last week came before the cabinet was moved from a back storage room of the store at 3131 Irving Blvd. Police say the public never came in contact with the heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine.

The property room immediately went over there and retrieved a file cabinet of the drugs, and they weighed each bag and each bag weighed the same that was listed on there, Mitchell said.

Every seal was still sealed. They did not appear to be tampered with and they put them back in the vault in the property room.

The case was referred to the Police Department's internal affairs division, and the people responsible could face discipline.

The mistake apparently happened in January as employees in the police property room were cleaning out file cabinets used to store drugs from criminal cases.

Officials were making room to build shelves, and the empty cabinets were sent to the CityStore.

The bags were connected to cases dating between 1994 and 2005, and police say it's unlikely any of those cases are still pending.

This is not the first sign of trouble for the Dallas police property room.

A 2008 city audit found that it was disorganized and lacked proper climate control and security.

Department officials largely agreed with those findings.

They said at the time that the division was understaffed, overworked and struggling in an aging facility with flooding and electrical problems.

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