‘Flare-ups’ ongoing at NYPD evidence warehouse — cause of fire unknown
A massive blaze at the NYPD’s Brooklyn impound warehouse appears to have been accidental, sources told The Post Wednesday — as officials began to assess the potential damage to decades of evidence stored at the facility.
Investigators were finally able to enter the scorched Erie Basin Auto Pound in Red Hook — more than 24 hours after flames began tearing through the facility on Tuesday morning, sending huge plumes of smoke into the air and more than a dozen employees inside fleeing.
The warehouse is used by the NYPD to house a variety of evidence dating back to the 1980s, including seized vehicles and motorcycles, and “historic vehicles” tied to past cases.
“Arson detectives are in there now rummaging through the materials that are left. A lot of data and DNA stuff, like prints and things of that nature, are backed up on a computer,” Paul DiGiacomo, head of the NYPD Detective Endowment Association, told The Post Wednesday afternoon.
No official cause has been released, but police sources said the inferno does not appear to be criminal in nature, with detectives eyeing electrical issues, such as outdated wiring or old generators, as possible culprits.
The three-alarm blaze broke out shortly after 10:30 a.m. and was placed under control at around 6 p.m. Tuesday. But by Wednesday morning, firefighters were still “handling fire flare-ups and hot spots” at the smoldering site and weren’t able to enter the building for hours later.
Full details on the warehouse’s inventory were not known, and no details on the possible damage have been disclosed. But sources said the department stores more than 1,000 barrels of evidence — dating to criminal cases prior to 2012 — at the facility, including DNA pulled from clothes and other items.
Much of it — including DNA — is backed up on computer files or with photographs, as was the case when Hurricane Sandy hit the warehouse in 2012, sources said.
The colossal storm, which ravaged the region, damaged the NYPD facility and ruined troves of evidence stored there.
After Sandy, provisions were announced to prevent future damage to the items kept at the site, but it’s unclear if those measures were ever taken.
Among the “historic vehicles” stored at the site are the patrol cars of fallen cops, including the cruiser where NYPD detectives Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were gunned down in 2014, and the squad car hero cop Edward Byrne was sitting when he was killed in 1988.
The potential loss of evidence would most likely impact cold cases — or possible future appeals, according to sources. Evidence tied to pending or active cases is not stored at the warehouse, the sources said.
However, DiGiacomo noted, the “problem lies” in that detectives would now be left unable to test any evidence again — as new technology is developed — if it has been destroyed.
“Science is developing at an alarming rate, every day there are new techniques to obtain evidence, that that’s where the problem lies,” he said. “Because now, a lot of these things were destroyed, where maybe later down the line in cold cases they may be able to obtain some evidence [with new technology], now it’s probably impossible to do.”
Additional reporting by Reuven Fenton
