“Welcome to the haunted house tour,” said Christopher Jaquez, a major with the Dallas Police Department, extending his hand and nodding toward a dark, cluttered warehouse. This was Friday morning, at the beginning of a tour of the department’s property room — Jaquez’s domain, far away from the corner office with the picture window he used to occupy at headquarters.
Never mind the nomenclature. This isn’t a room at all, but a decrepit series of rooms and warehouses tucked off Baylor Street between Interstate 30 and the DART depot: 54,000 overstuffed, oft-unnavigable, poorly lit square feet. Rickety shelves are packed tight with stolen things, stolen lives. Misery and brutality sealed in tiny cardboard boxes — with handwritten labels — and stuck on a shelf. Stolen credit cards in this box; torn panties in this one; fingernails in another.
Just a godforsaken sprawl of the worst things this city can conjure. Nightmares as far as the eye can see.
There are weapons, too, of course, more than 230,000 in here, including shotguns made of plumber’s pipes and Nerf pump-actions transformed into semi-automatic killing machines and pistols fashioned from ballpoint pens.
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“Officers wouldn’t know any better,” said Officer Michael Henderson, who spends all day fixing and firing guns used to commit crimes. “They would take it out and then you would just have a little spring action that would shoot.”
There are shelves filled with boxes filled with pistols, and walls lined with long guns, from sawed-off shotguns to a military-issued semi-automatic outfitted with a night-vision scope. Even — and what the hell — a rocket launcher.
Not every lethal weapon on the street looks like one. These are just some of the altered firearms taken off Dallas streets.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
“All off the streets of the city of Dallas,” Henderson said.
There’s a dope room, too, that smells of weed but is likely just as full of meth-making chemicals, fentanyl and, of late, carfentanil. “Fentanyl on steroids” is how Chief Daniel Comeaux described it Friday as we stood in the dark, beneath lights that don’t work, near buckets draped in tarps to protect them from a leaky ceiling.
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“Narcan doesn’t even work on it,” said Matthew Merta, who keeps watch over this warehouse. “It’s just scary stuff.”
Gay Donnell Willis, the mayor’s recently appointed chair of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, invited me on this tour to reveal what no one disputes: The property and evidence room needs to be replaced. Yesterday. Years ago. Which is the same position taken by her predecessor, Far North Dallas council member Cara Mendelsohn, who, during an April 15 council briefing, said this “might be the worst building that the city has.”
Except Mendelsohn is now campaigning against the $443 million bond package meant to help fund, among other things, the forever-promised and even longer-delayed law-enforcement training facilities and move this decrepit property and evidence room out of this crumbling 1952 building. She and the other bust-the-bonders maintain that the $40 million in Prop A earmarked for a new 911 call center in The Cedars is a smokescreen behind which the mayor and city manager will move out of Dallas City Hall.
Buckets and tarps protect evidence in the drug vault.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
Mendelsohn tried a few months ago to separate the proposition into individual items. But a majority of the council wouldn’t go along with it. Which leaves the long-time chair of public safety now campaigning against funding a replacement for Dallas’ worst building.
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“This city is weird, man,” Comeaux said over the weekend as he tried to piece it all together. “Weird.”
He used a lot of other words, too. Like disappointing. And frustrating. And political.
“And I don’t get into the politics of it,” he said. “You tell me what I have and don’t have, and I will do my best to make it work. But I don’t feel like this should be political. This is necessary. This is a need. I cannot say if I am supporting the bond. What I can do is tell you my opinion of the facilities. I can’t tell you how to vote, but I can tell you our gun range is crappy and our property room is even worse.”
Comeaux said he had no idea how bad it was until he’d been offered the job some 19 months ago, at which point he toured the facilities. At which point, he said, “I thought I’d been pranked.”
Dallas Police Department Sgt. Judy Katz stands in the confiscated drugs area of the police property room. Much of the evidence that the police department must inventory and store must be covered with plastic tarps because of a leaking roof. Did we mention that this photo is from August 2006?
JIM MAHONEY/Dallas Morning News
Because it’s not just the warehouse that’s a wreck, but the whole colorless, broken building. From the dingy back offices to the kitchen with the busted oven and leaky sink. “We just use the microwave,” said Jaquez, who was brought over from the Jack Evans Headquarters to see if he could make sense of this shambles.
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He said the department bought the Baylor Street building for a little more than $1 million in 1984 and moved in 17 years later, around the time an audit revealed that new evidence was coming in far faster than old evidence was being removed. But the warehouse was already outdated, having been built in the 1950s on an unsecured public street accessible to anyone, including a man who recently climbed atop of the billboard just outside the property room’s entrance and didn’t come down until his mother showed up.
“That could have been really bad,” Jaquez said.
How things are stored in the Dallas PD’s property and evidence room, because there’s simply no room.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
The major said they’re just taking in more than they’re returning, removing, destroying — more evidence, more guns, more ammo, more knives, more stolen bicycles. More everything. Jaquez said they’ve taken in an additional 145,000 additional items just since 2023, which is why the shelving — much of it donated — stretches to the ceilings. They’re at 120% capacity, he said. And it gets worse every time an officer walks through that door with another crate of stolen goods or another weapon used to commit a crime.
Audits going back to 2001, including one sparked by a 2007 Dallas Morning News report, have uncovered numerous issues with the property room, from a shortage of space to the possibility that evidence could go lost (or get stolen) or wind up ruined by the slow, endless drip-drip-drip of a leaky roof and air conditioning units whose corroded pipes precariously dangle over boxes and buckets. Jaquez said the roof is thick with layers of tar slathered on over the years to keep the rain at bay.
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None of which is unique to Dallas: A 2016 white paper from The Bill Blackwood Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas at Texas Woman’s University lamented that “police property rooms are still being ignored and not given the attention that is needed to properly store and maintain these areas of the police department.”
One of the countless aisles of cardboard boxes that fill the Dallas police property and evidence room on Baylor Street.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
It takes officers hours to find a piece of evidence — a waste of time, when they could be out responding to calls. But the chief said he’s not aware of anything being lost. Nor, he said, has he heard of a single complaint from a prosecutor.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be worried,” Comeaux said. “But if you have a serial rapist out there and the roof leaks on this evidence and if he gets off …” He trailed off. “We can’t have this. We’re Dallas.”
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And in Dallas, the property room fills and fills and fills. Twice Friday, we walked past the area where officers check in. One cop was sliding a bloody kitchen knife, from a stabbing that had occurred just moments earlier, into a plastic tube. Later, another was taping up the belongings of a homeless man who’d died at a DART bus shelter.
An unexplained death. Another cardboard box.