DECATUR - Officer Dan Ashenfelter's realm at the Decatur Police Department is comprised of shelves, lockers and boxes stuffed with thousands of pieces of evidence collected during investigations into crimes ranging from murder to burglary to domestic battery.

"When we moved here in 1989," Ashenfelter said of the department's space in the Law Enforcement Center, "we already had a lot of stuff on hand. Since then, we have used 176,973 property tags."

As the police department's property officer, Ashenfelter must locate any of those items if called upon to do so, such as when items are sent to the Illinois State Police Crime Laboratory for analysis or when cases go to court for trial.

Most of the items in evidence must be kept 25 years before they can be destroyed but there are exceptions.

Homicide and sexual assault evidence must be kept forever, said Deputy Police Chief Ed Smith, Ashenfelter's boss.

Ashenfelter said even if a convicted murder dies, the evidence must be preserved in case someone decides to try to clear the convicted man's name post mortem.

"We can't get rid of any evidence seized under a search warrant until it is released by a judge," Smith said.

Ashenfelter joined the police department in April 1969 and became property officer in January 1989. He will retire in December 2009 when he turns 63, the state's mandatory retirement age for police officers.

Smith praised Ashenfelter's organization efforts, noting he has digitalized photograph storage which has done away with cumbersome files and also supported a hoped-for move to bar coding evidence to make each item easier to identify.

"One of the consultants (doing a space study for the city) laughed at us," Smith said. "He said we were so efficient in maximizing space that it was a deterrent to our cause" in trying to get a larger building.

"We're looking at bar coding evidence but the cost to do it will be $20,000 to $30,000 and we don't have the money," Smith said. "The evidence cards we use to tag items now have been in use more than 50 years. If we could bar code this stuff now, it would make any future move to a new building easier."

Among stored items one of the biggest space eaters is garbage sacks and bales of marijuana.

"We have a burn barrel for the drugs," Smith said.

When the Illinois State Police regional narcotics task force disbanded two years ago, the State Police returned all the drug evidence held by the state from local cases, a move which left Ashenfelter scrambling to find space to store everything.

A mouse once found its way into a box full of marijuana and all efforts to trap it failed until someone told him to bait his traps with some of the weed, Ashenfelter said.

"Mice just love it," he said. "It did the trick."

A shortage of space is not new. Ashenfelter said he has four to five 3.5-cubic foot storage boxes piled up in each row of an alphabetized filing system that places an "A" on the first box, "AA" on the second and so forth. He said while the system runs from A to Z, he ran out of space for boxes under that system in April 2005.

Since that time, Ashenfelter said he has filled another 100 of the large storage boxes.

"For example, since 2001 I've stored about 70 boxes of sexual assault stuff," he said. "We have mattress pads, couch cushions and clothes. When we first started gathering sexual assault kits, we'd get whole blood that needed refrigeration. We don't do that anymore."

Clothing storage is a particular headache, especially when items are brought in damp and bloody or muddy, Ashenfelter said. Currently, those items are hung in the department's laboratory to dry before being put away but regular clothes drying area is on his wish list for a new building, he said.

SOME THINGS IN STORAGE

Stacked amid hundreds of firearms, bales of marijuana, swords, cans and cases of beer and baseball bats in the Decatur Police Department's evidence storage rooms are a few items that Ashenfelter views as "different."

The list includes:

- A false leg found on a city bus

- A baby seat from a seized vehicle

- A medieval-style morning star or mace consisting of a chain linking a handle and a metal ball with spikes

- A wide assortment of rocks and bricks used as weapons or to break windows or doors during burglaries

- A locker full of athletic shoes.

"It smells real good in there," the property officer said of the locker full of shoes.

ringram@herald-review.com|421-7973