Guns, money found in court
Worker discovers box of missing arms in trash at justice center
A worker stumbled across a box of guns and money sitting with the trash on Thursday at the shuttered Harris County courthouse, where a would-be thief apparently ditched the stash of decade-old evidence.
Officials said it wasn’t immediately clear from which court the weapons came or whether other evidence may be missing from the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, which has been closed to the public since Hurricane Harvey struck in August.
“This is like a bizarro world Watergate, if you have something like a burglary that ends up as much more than that,” said defense attorney Murray Newman. “If the integrity of where they’re storing evidence is compromised, that could have a lot of ramifications down the road.”
Word of the mishap emerged this week when a Harris County District Attorney’s Office investigator wrote the court administrator admitting that the officials had inadvertently searched a restricted area on the wrong floor without permission.
“It was the exigency of the situation — an unsecured box of weapons and money, with the possibility that people were looting the courthouse — that compelled us to act quickly,” Chief Investigator Stephen Clappart wrote to Court Administrator Clay Bowman in an email obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
The investigators started their search after receiving a report about the box, according to the district attorney’s office.
“Through an unfortunate series of miscommunications and misunderstandings, two District Attorney investigators were sent to the 7th floor of the Criminal Justice Center to investigate information that a box of evidence that included loose handguns, knives and money was located there,” Clappart wrote in the email.
“Based on what they had been told at the time, they believed in good faith that this box was on the 7th floor and that immediate action was necessary to secure the box to prevent it from being removed from the courthouse,” he continued.
The email explains that the box actually had been spotted on the 17th floor.
“Had that information been better communicated to us, we would never have looked for the box on the 7th floor at all,” Clappart wrote. “There was also a misunderstanding about the restricted status of the 7th floor. The investigators sent to investigate were unaware at that time that the 7th floor was restricted space dedicated to your staff.”
In the end, investigators located only the box — containing eight handguns and ammunition — only when someone else turned it into Facilities and Property Maintenance at 1310 Prairie. Its contents had been tagged as exhibits in trials going back decades.
A day after the weapons were found, there were still few answers about where they came from.
“In Watergate, it’s follow the money,” Newman said, “but in this case it’s follow the guns.”
The District Courts Administrator and Precinct 1 Constable’s Office — which oversees courthouse complex security — did not respond Friday to a request for comment.
District Clerk Chris Daniel said his office would be responsible only for maintaining cash and nonfirearms after a case is closed, while the Harris County Sheriff’s Office would be responsible for securing drugs and guns in old cases.
“It is likely that if the items found in the boxes are tied to any recent or pending cases that they were left behind by the court reporter maintaining possession while a case is going,” Daniel said.
It’s not clear why the guns were still in the courthouse, since the district attorney’s office said in a statement that they were from cases “going back decades.”
Alex Bunin, chief of the Harris County Public Defender’s Office, was unsurprised to hear about the out-of-place weapons.
“There’s not an evidence room in this town that has not had problems holding onto their evidence,” he said. “It happens probably more than we know.”