More than 200 firearms locked in evidence at the Durango Police Department were pulverized earlier this month.
The department sent the weapons to a gun-pulverizing company June 11 in Pueblo. A wide variety of firearms were destroyed.
“There were a lot of pistols, a lot of rifles,” said Kim Wall, a property and evidence technician for the DPD. “It was really, really random.”
Many of the 208 weapons had been there for more than 10 years, including a 1989 machine gun, which was the oldest gun destroyed.
Guns locked in evidence are held by the police department until they can be returned to their owners. If an owner can’t be found, or the owner isn’t allowed to repossess the gun, the gun will be destroyed.
The majority of guns destroyed were used as evidence in court cases, and the owners couldn’t be located, Wall said. Some of the guns were found after having been lost, and others were voluntarily given to the police department by family members.
Before a gun is destroyed, the department has to make sure it didn’t legally belong to someone else. Wall spent hundreds of hours over a period of three years attempting to locate owners of the weapons.
“I got into some really interesting databases to try to find every owner that had the ability to get their firearm back,” Wall said. “If there was any chance we thought we could locate the owner, we didn’t destroy them.”
All the weapons had to be approved for destruction by the 6th Judicial District Courts, said Durango Police Cmdr. Ray Shupe. The department filed a petition April 9 in District Court. The courts initially approved the destruction of 167 guns but required the department to further inquire about the status of the remaining guns or potential owners.
Tracking down owners of older weapons can be extremely difficult, Wall said. Modern firearms can be traced through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. If the weapon is older, however, there won’t be a transaction record, which meant Wall had to sift through evidence and court documents. Once an owner is located, Wall had to research the owner’s criminal background to make sure he or she was legally allowed to repossess the weapon.
Of the 208 guns destroyed, 157 had been stored as evidence in criminal cases. A majority of those cases involved drug busts or domestic violence offenses, Shupe said. Anyone convicted of a felony isn’t legally allowed to possess weapons, so police can’t return them.
According to Colorado law, guns used in a homicide can’t be destroyed until all parties involved in the case are deceased.
Thirty guns in evidence storage had been found over the years and were turned over to the police department, Wall said. Police also held 14 guns as “safekeeping” to prevent individuals from harming themselves or others, and three were turned in by the owners to be destroyed.
Destruction of the weapons should clear up some much-needed room for more guns, Wall said.
“We were so out of room in our gun room area, it was just crazy,” she said. “1989 is a long time to hold a firearm.”
Wall estimates the police department still has about 100 guns stored in evidence that haven’t been destroyed. The department didn’t destroy any guns made after 2015 because most of those guns are linked to pending court cases, Wall said. Other guns might belong to people who are serving a probation sentence and legally cannot possess the weapons. Once their probation period is complete, the guns will be returned to them.
None of the weapons destroyed were old service weapons used by the department. The DPD doesn’t provide service weapons to its officers; instead, officers are required to purchase their own firearm within a certain set of standards, including manufacturer, caliber and type of weapon, Shupe said.
The Pueblo gun-busting company uses a pulverizer to destroy the weapons in seconds. The company takes photos of each gun being destroyed that will be sent back to the department for its records, Wall said.
Destroying weapons doesn’t cost the police department any money, Shupe said. Gun-busting companies typically make money by salvaging non-serialized parts, such as grips, sights and cylinders.
DPD last destroyed weapons in 2013. Wall hopes her work will make it easier in the future to track down owners and that the department can destroy guns every year or two, she said.
“I’m so glad we destroyed them,” Wall said. “Hopefully, from here on out, the weapons won’t be as old and we can do this on a more consistent basis.”
asemadeni@durangoherald.com