Upper Darby sends guns to Chester to be melted down
UPPER DARBY » More than 100 guns that have been used in violent crimes will stay off the streets permanently when the Upper Darby Police Department sends them to a waste management plant to destroyed.
Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood Wednesday unveiled a cache of 125 firearms that have been stored at the department as evidence that will now go through the trash-tosteam process at Covanta Delaware Valley’s Chester plant. The arsenal of weapons was made up of 43 long guns and 82 handguns.
“Today they’re firearms, tomorrow they’re going to be electricity,” said Chitwood. “These guns over the many years have been confiscated in robberies, in shootings, in domestics, in suicides, in investigations … Our goal is to make sure these guns never hit the streets again.”
The guns that will be disposed of are the results of guilty pleas and court-ordered forfeitures, Chitwood added.
Included in the cache was the 9mm handgun used in a robbery and potential sexual assault at a township laundromat in February 2017. The woman working at the laundromat fought off her attacker and in the struggle the gun was fired and hit the suspect who then fled, leaving the gun. He was caught and the victim turned the gun over to police.
One of the long guns Chitwood displayed was an AK-47 and an AR-15 recovered in October 2014 from a drug raid in the 2200 block of Windsor Avenue.
“The point I’m trying to make is that these types of firearms are in the hands of some very, very dangerous criminal-minded, criminaloriented individuals, and it gives me great pleasure to destroy them and never have them used anywhere else,” said Chitwood.
The department last did a gun burn in 2015 and has done them about every three years before that, destroying hundreds of guns.
Chitwood said he is considering a buypack program in the department to get guns off the streets. At present, community members may voluntarily forfeit their firearms at police headquarters to be destroyed.