NYPD Warehouse Blaze Snuffed A Decade After A Promised Move: Reports

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — A massive blaze at a NYPD storage warehouse was finally extinguished on Wednesday evening, a decade after police promised to relocate the crucial evidence, according to reports.

The blaze, which fire officials said they expected to burn for days, was mostly quenched at 6 p.m. Wednesday, according to News12.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation as of Thursday morning, FDNY officials told Patch.

Questions are already arising about what the loss of the massive NYPD storage facility means, and also why the warehouse was still being used a decade after officials pledged to relocate evidence in the wake of Superstorm Sandy.

During the historic storm, the Erie Basin warehouse was flooded, the New York Times reported, and piles of evidence, including forensic and genetic material, became contaminated with raw sewage.

Afterwards, police officials announced that there were no plans to repair the facility and that the decades-old evidence, a source of crucial exonerations for the wrongly convicted, would be moved as a new storage center was constructed, the Times reported.

Why evidence was continued to be stored at the damaged facility is not known at this time, the Times wrote.

But one thing that experts already know is how the loss of decades of evidence will affect future cases and exonerations, with a former Queens district attorney telling the times that the situation is a "nightmare."

“If there are cases that rely on forensic evidence using technology that didn’t exist years ago, now that evidence has all been destroyed,” civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby told the Times. “Something like this can be catastrophic for someone’s hope for freedom.”

“I’m quite confident in saying there are many prisoners who may have been wrongfully convicted, who may never be able to prove it because evidence was destroyed in this fire,” Kuby told the New York Daily News. ”... The casualties of this fire are not firefighters, but the wrongfully convicted who will never be able to open their cases.”

“If evidence was destroyed that relates to clients with pending wrongful conviction cases, this could be the end of the line,” defense attorney Cary London told the News. “The destruction of evidence could be the nail in the coffin for those clients, unfortunately.”

Read more coverage of the fire and its implications form The New York Times and the New York Daily News.