UPDATE 7 p.m.

We’ve just talked to Bob Boone…and the PD has it all figured out.

Turns out that after there was a significant break-in at city hall/PD in 1985, in which the burglar/thief accessed the PD through the library (which is adjacent to the PD/city hall) and stole about everything they had on-hand as evidence, the police on the force needed a safe place to stash evidence until they could come up with the money/material to store it without it being accessed by thieves.

It took a while to set up an actual evidence room, with steel lockers, lock boxes and a limited number of keys. During that time, the only safe location they could store the evidence, being that the rest of city hall was utilized frequently, was up in the suspended tiles.

All the old evidence, in paper bags, then in garbage bags with red evidence tape around them, was stored in the ceiling. Apparently none of the cases needed evidence accessed. A new storage area was set up, and the old one was forgotten.

Then today, when it all came down, Bob Boone, he told us, was “just as surprised as anyone.”

He described the evidence as “dry as bug dust,” including some of the plastic bags that surrounded the rotted paper bags, which held rotted marijuana, and then some items of drug paraphernalia.

Boone said the tags bore dates of 1983-1985, and some did indeed have his signature on them because he was at the department from 1982-85.

Boone said he knew any statute of limitation for destruction of evidence would have gone out years ago, so he went ahead and got it out of the way by burning, which is the preferred destruction method of such evidence anyway.

Any corresponding evidence logs, Boone said, would be long gone as well.

Boone said he was “as embarrassed as I could be” that the construction guys at the PD had to encounter such a thing, especially after the Raymond Martin debacle in 2009-2010. But he said that now that Shannon Bradley is sheriff, he and Bradley are working to restore faith in law enforcement in Gallatin County, and he apologized for any appearance of impropriety with the aged evidence today, and hopes that folks will come by and talk to him about it if they’d like to do so.

Below is the original post:

GALLATIN CO.—In an interesting incident occurring just after 2 p.m. this afternoon (Thursday, Sept. 5, 2013), a renovation in a local police department uncovered a batch of loot dating back to the 1980s.

Carpenters working on the ceiling at the police department in Shawneetown loosened some of the ceiling tiles in the chief’s office and were stunned when garbage bags, sealed with red “evidence” tape and containing various seized items of dope and drug paraphernalia, fell to the floor.

We’ve been told that many of the bags busted open, spilling old dried weed and marijuana seeds all across it. Also contained therein were needles, pipes and “other drug paraphernalia.”

Reports indicate that chief of police Bob Boone “hurried and grabbed the evidence” and took it to a trash can right outside the PD, setting fire for it and burning it all up.

At one point, in his gathering up of the bags, Boone was heard to say “let me know if you find a gun,” but to whom that was issued is unknown; there were several people in the building at the time, and the scene is being described as “chaotic.”

Many of the evidence tags, we’ve been told, had Boone’s name on them, as he’s been in law enforcement in the area for quite some time.

According to our calculations, 1984 may have been a little pre-Raymond Martin, but not by much. We’re looking to see who might have been chief of police at the time, as well as sheriff, although we’re thinking the latter might have been Glenn McCabe. The county has a separate office in the courthouse for the sheriff, and, as we learned at Raymond’s trial, most of the county’s evidence was kept in the basement of the county courthouse, but it’s not too much of a stretch to think that Raymond might have hidden “useful” seizures up in the ceiling tiles of the PD…if he’d been able to access them early in his career (Martin became sheriff in 1990, but worked under McCabe).

Gallatin County Sheriff Shannon Bradley has been notified of the situation.

We’ve put out a call for photos and are awaiting them currently.