Firefighters have taken two days to shut down the facilities
Crimes, robberies, assaults… No wonder the smoke coming out of the New York Police (NYPD) warehouses was so black and thick. The massive fire that began on Monday in the warehouses where the NYPD police series stores the evidence of its relatively ‘cold’ cases was still burning the next day, and with it the hopes of obtaining justice.
Decades of unsolved crimes went up in flames before the stunned gaze of Patrol Chief Jeffrey Maddrey, who didn’t want to give it all up until they could go in to “assess the damage.” But hour after hour, day after day, the flames multiplied, leaving little to assess. Inside the warehouse in the Red Hook neighborhood, in Brooklyn, there were also numerous electric bicycles, whose lithium batteries exploded one after the other, replicating the fire. To the point where the police had to use their drones to alert the firefighters where the lights were appearing. Six firefighters and two police officers were injured in the first attempts, before it was known that the warehouse was a minefield.
Soon the place was in danger of collapsing and the tasks of suffocating it had to be transferred to the sea, with six fire boats firing water pipes. It wasn’t just the cold cases and hot bikes that burned, it was the body’s deepest memories as well. There was the patrol car of officer Ed Byrne, who was shot to the head in 1988 while guarding the home of a protected witness who was about to testify in a drug case. He had just turned 22, five days earlier. Or the mobile booth of detective Miostis Familia, a single mother of three, murdered at the age of 48 by an unbalanced gunman. And it is that the Police also have her little heart. The warehouse was, in large part, its own museum of heartfelt relics.
It was not the first time that evidence bags had been exposed to destruction. During Hurricane Sandy ten years ago, flooding threatened the viability of blood, sweat, semen, and other DNA evidence stored on this very property. Fortunately, it is not the only one that the NYPD has in the city for this purpose. It is believed that there are six others, which guarantees that all is not lost, at least for all the victims of the most filmed city in the world in police series.
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