\u201cWelcome to the haunted house tour,\u201d 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\u2019s property room \u2014 Jaquez\u2019s domain, far away from the corner office with the picture window he used to occupy at headquarters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Never mind the nomenclature. This isn\u2019t 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 \u2014 with handwritten labels \u2014 and stuck on a shelf. Stolen credit cards in this box; torn panties in this one; fingernails in another.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Just a godforsaken sprawl of the worst things this city can conjure. Nightmares as far as the eye can see.<\/p>\n
There are weapons, too, of course, more than 230,000 in here, including shotguns made of plumber\u2019s pipes and Nerf pump-actions transformed into semi-automatic killing machines and pistols fashioned from ballpoint pens.<\/p>\n
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\u201cOfficers wouldn’t know any better,\u201d said Officer Michael Henderson, who spends all day fixing and firing guns used to commit crimes. \u201cThey would take it out and then you would just have a little spring action that would shoot.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 and what the hell \u2014 a rocket launcher.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Not every lethal weapon on the street looks like one. These are just\u00a0some of the altered firearms taken off Dallas streets.<\/p>\n
Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n
\u201cAll off the streets of the city of Dallas,\u201d\u00a0Henderson said.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a dope room, too, that smells of weed but is likely just as full of\u00a0meth-making chemicals, fentanyl and, of late, carfentanil. \u201cFentanyl on steroids\u201d is how Chief Daniel Comeaux described it Friday as we stood in the dark, beneath lights that don\u2019t work, near buckets draped in tarps to protect them from a leaky ceiling.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u201cNarcan doesn\u2019t even work on it,\u201d said Matthew Merta, who keeps watch over this warehouse. \u201cIt\u2019s just scary stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gay Donnell Willis, the mayor\u2019s recently appointed chair of the City Council\u2019s 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 \u201cmight be the worst building that the city has<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Except Mendelsohn is now campaigning against the $443 million bond package<\/a> 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<\/a>. She and the other bust-the-bonders<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n Buckets and tarps protect evidence in the drug vault.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n Mendelsohn tried a few months ago to separate the proposition into individual items. But a majority of the council wouldn\u2019t go along with it. Which leaves the long-time chair of public safety now campaigning against funding a replacement for Dallas\u2019 worst building.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cThis city is weird, man,\u201d Comeaux said over the weekend as he tried to piece it all together. \u201cWeird.\u201d<\/p>\n He used a lot of other words, too. Like disappointing. And frustrating. And political. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I don\u2019t get into the politics of it,\u201d he said. \u201cYou tell me what I have and don\u2019t have, and I will do my best to make it work. But I don\u2019t 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\u2019t tell you how to vote, but I can tell you our gun range is crappy and our property room is even worse.\u201d<\/p>\n Comeaux said he had no idea how bad it was until he\u2019d been offered the job some 19 months ago, at which point he toured the facilities. At which point, he said, \u201cI thought I\u2019d been pranked.\u201d<\/p>\n 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?<\/p>\n JIM MAHONEY\/Dallas Morning News<\/p>\n Because it\u2019s not just the warehouse that\u2019s a wreck, but the whole colorless, broken building. From the dingy back offices to the kitchen with the busted oven and leaky sink. \u201cWe just use the microwave,\u201d said Jaquez, who was brought over from the Jack Evans Headquarters to see if he could make sense of this shambles.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n 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\u2019s entrance and didn\u2019t come down until his mother showed up.<\/p>\n \u201cThat could have been really bad,\u201d Jaquez said.<\/p>\n How things are stored in the Dallas PD\u2019s property and evidence room, because there\u2019s simply no room.<\/p>\n Robert Wilonsky\/Staff writer<\/p>\n The major said they\u2019re just taking in more than they\u2019re returning, removing, destroying \u2014 more evidence, more guns, more ammo, more knives, more stolen bicycles. More everything. Jaquez said they\u2019ve taken in an additional 145,000 additional items just since 2023, which is why the shelving \u2014 much of it donated \u2014 stretches to the ceilings. They\u2019re 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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