Below the main level of the Florence City-County Complex and isolated from the everyday hustle of government business is a room that breaks and makes criminal cases, exonerates and imprisons suspects and assures and casts doubt for jurors.
The Florence Police Department’s evidence room is in the basement of the complex and is part of the former jail and bookings intake area.
While patrol officers and crime scene investigators frequent the area, few are allowed inside the actual evidence room which is locked, gated and armed with an alarm, said Florence Police Sgt. Angela Becker.
She and Lt. Floyd Harrell are the only people allowed in the actual evidence room, with the exception of the two top officers on the force: Florence Police Chief Anson Shells and Inspector Allen Heidler, said Becker, who is the sergeant over evidence and property.
“Mainly this is for court purposes and for the chain of custody, which is the very important aspect of someone’s trial,” she said. “When an officer logs in evidence, it is strictly under our control, no matter what the evidence is.
“This is best. The less people that have access to the evidence, then the less someone can say someone tampered with the evidence.”
Everything from swords to cases of beer are being held in the evidence room, Becker said. While certain materials are eventually destroyed or sold at a police auction, some evidence has been around more than 30 years.
Materials from homicides are usually kept the longest because of the appeals process for convicted felons and because some pieces are evidence in death penalty cases, she said.
“The oldest is probably from 1979 and 1981. It’s an unsolved homicide,” she said.
While Becker said she hasn’t seen any apparitions in the evidence room, she sometimes gets a funny feeling when she walks through the area where homicide evidence is kept.
“I don’t know, it’s just eerie,” she said.
In 2008, when police kept bringing in articles of clothing and other evidence from the unearthed bodies of 42-year-old Joretha Lynn Kirk and 51-year-old Rachel Samuel, Becker said she felt that same eerie feeling. The two women were killed, then buried behind a Gaillard Street home in September 2008.
All evidence is turned in at the end of an officers’ shift, as they are not allowed to take home evidence or leave it in their cars.
Each officer makes a log in the evidence book and locks the evidence in lockers in the evidence holding room, to which only Becker and Harrell have keys. From there it’s moved into the evidence room, she said.
All drugs and narcotics have to be sent to the State Law Enforcement Division in Columbia for analysis.
“And it has be secured, that’s another part of the chain of custody. They put it in a plastic bag, (the officer) is the only one that seals it, I can’t even seal it and I can’t take it out,” Becker said.
Drugs stay in the evidence room until someone from the Florence Police Crime Scene Unit delivers it to SLED.
At some point, it is sent back to Florence where it is kept until a case comes to court, which can take several years, she said.
The drug area, like the homicide area, has a distinctive smell, Becker said. After a court case, most drug evidence is destroyed.
Guns in evidence are taken to a local steel mill where they are melted and destroyed, Becker said.
Citizens try to liken the job to the CBS television series “CSI: Miami,” but the officers who actually work in the Florence crime scene unit say it’s not quite the same and not even close to being the way it’s portrayed in Hollywood.
“We might handle something as minor as someone breaking into a car or handling an extreme scene such a homicide,” Florence Police Crime Scene Unit Investigator Shannon Hill said. “We handle armed robberies, burglaries — basically whatever the investigator needs. We’re like a tool in his toolbox.”
The four-man squad also uses advanced computer equipment to analyze surveillance video and audio in missing persons and crime cases.
The unit conducts chemical analysis on substances thought to be marijuana, said Florence Police Cpl. Bo Myers, who is also a member of the unit.
Myers and Hill said the unit members work in concert and processes a crime scene in a procedural manner.
During homicide investigations, they coordinate with EMS workers and first responders to establish what happened at a scene, Myers said.
“We like to talk to EMS to just see how the body was positioned to see what different things were around it,” he said. “Initially something may look out of place to us, but (EMS) may have rolled body just to do what they need to.”
Every death scene is treated as a homicide until they discover evidence that leads them to believe otherwise, Myers said.
“This lets us be more thorough,” Hill said. “We don’t want to miss anything. So we treat it as a homicide. We do a lot of that work with the coroner.”
It can take several hours to several days to process a scene.
“It has to do with what your mindset is,” Myers said. “It’s the blinder effect; you’ve got to work with your blinders on. You’ve got to be able to focus.”
There are some cases that affect the crime scene unit members more than others and there are cases that cause them to lose sleep at night, Myers said.
But the members of the unit lean on each other for support outside the crime scene, he said.
“Everybody handles it in their own way. Some people make little jokes, some people get real quiet,” Hill said. “It’s like a fireman, I guess you wonder why he goes into burning building. He does it cause that’s his job.”
“We’ve been chosen for the position we’re in. Not everybody can do it,” Myers said. “Day to day, it’s not dramatic and glamorous at all.”
When cases are presented before a judge and jury, crime scene investigators encounter what is known as the “CSI effect,” Myers said.
They have to explain their jobs to jurors and sometimes convince them that it isn’t what they see on TV, he said.
The real crime scene techs find TV shows that portray their job laughable at times.
“They (actors) take a picture of a fingerprint with their camera and then they automatically get a report,” Myers said. “That’s the funny thing.”
“People think you can take a tube of plaster and insert it into a stab wound , give it a couple of minutes and pull it out and it’s the exact shape of the knife,” said Maj. Carlos Raines, who oversees
Florence police investigations. “That’s not true ... you’re going end up with a glob of whatever substance it is you stuck down there.”
Television crime scene programs are grossly exaggerated pieces of truth, Hill said.
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