Authorities in Houston, Texas, are looking to destroy long-held evidence that has spawned "drug-addicted rats" in police storerooms. At a Friday press conference, Houston police chief J Noe Diaz described "over 1.2 million pieces of evidence" held by the city's police, including notes from a 1947 homicide and "kilos of cocaine" from 1990s drug cases, in which the culprits have already served prison sentences and been released, per the Guardian. "We've got 400,000 pounds of marijuana in storage that the rats are the only ones enjoying," says Mayor John Whitmire. Officials also described rats getting into packages of magic mushrooms, per KHOU.
Peter Stout, head of the Houston Forensic Science Center, said exterminators have struggled to get rid of rats and other pests attracted to the "tasty" drugs. "They're drug-addicted rats. They're tough to deal with," he said, per the Washington Post. Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare noted "it costs a lot of money to destroy illicit narcotics and so the DA's office is going to utilize funds that we control to help the city with this immediate problem."
Teare said narcotics evidence obtained prior to 2015 would now be destroyed. The DA's office completed its first burn of some 15,000 pounds of narcotics on Thursday, the Post reports. Though critics say certain evidence could be key in the future, stressing its role in overturning wrongful convictions, the DA's office said it would hire a prosecutor to determine the pieces of evidence which it no longer makes sense to keep. The hired prosecutor will also be tasked with setting parameters for how best to store and maintain evidence to keep rats at bay. (More Texas stories.)
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