Houston has found itself with a problem after drug-eating rats invaded the city’s police evidence room, according to officials.
Last Friday, a handful of city officials including Houston mayor John Whitmire, police chief J Noe Diaz and Harris county district attorney Sean Teare gave a press conference in which they announced new efforts to clear out outdated evidence from the Houston police’s evidence room which has been infested with rats, KHOU reports.
Speaking at the press conference, Whitmire said: “Just one example, we’ve got 400,000lbs of marijuana in storage that the rats are the only ones enjoying.”
Echoing similar sentiments, Diaz said: “We have over 1.2 million pieces of evidence here at the Houston police department. We have notes from a 1947 homicide that we still keep … We have instances where we have kilos of cocaine from the 90s where people have already been sent to prison, have already been released from the sentence, and we still store it.”
Joshua Reiss, general counsel of the Harris county district attorney’s office, said the rats had also managed to get into an evidence room belonging to Houston police’s narcotics division.
“The Harris county district attorney’s office was notified last week that the HPD Narcotics Evidence Room at 1200 Travis had a problem or issue with rodents,” Reiss told KHOU, adding: “They got into packaging containing mushrooms.”
According to Reiss, narcotics evidence rooms and evidence rooms in general “are filled to the brims with old evidence … [it is] a national issue”.
At the press conference, Teare said: “We’re going to start to fix a systemic problem that has hit every one of our property rooms, which is, we don’t destroy evidence when it no longer makes any sense to keep it … We will be destroying any narcotics evidence that has been obtained prior to 2015.”
