It’s taken three years of hard work by police officers and jail trusties, but the Slidell Police Department finally opened its Evidence and Administration Building Monday morning.

The 5,900-square-foot, three-story building located behind the main police building on Third Street will not only house all the important evidence gathered by police in criminal cases, but it will ease the crowding in the main building.

The new building actually replaces two buildings that were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters in 2005, said Slidell Police Chief Freddie Drennan. Before the hurricane, there was a building for extra office space and another to store evidence. Six feet of water washed into the buildings, wiping out the offices and soaking over 13,000 pieces of evidence.

Slidell Police Chief Freddie Drennan shows off the tanks used to find fingerprints in the Crime Scene Unit offices in the new Evidence and Administrative building that officially opened Monday. (Staff Photo by Erik Sanzenbach)

“We were able to salvage all the evidence,” Drennan said proudly.

Evidence Custodian Debbie McCormick and three police officers were able to return the evidence to usable condition through a painstaking process of using refrigerated trucks and long hours of hard work carefully drying out documents and other pieces of evidence.

“We never lost a case in court because of the evidence,” Drennan said.

For the past three years, the police department has been storing the evidence in a FEMA trailer at an undisclosed location. The trailer was fitted with security cameras, alarms and bars on the windows.

The new evidence room is located on the top floor of the new building. It is equipped with a state-of-the-art cataloging system using movable shelves and computers. At any one time, there are over 23,000 pieces of evidence that McCormick has to catalog and store.

The first floor of the building is just the entrance, which keeps the rest of the facility safe from floods. On the second floor are the offices of Professional Standards, Internal Affairs and Information Technology. There is also a state-of-the-art conference room that will be used for press conferences.

Next to the evidence room on the third floor is the Crime Scene labs and offices, where crime scene technicians spend time looking for fingerprints and analyzing hairs, fibers and blood samples collected at crime scenes.

The building was constructed at a cost of $1.2 million, according to Director of Information Technology and the project manager Sharon Gorman. Part of the money came from an $847,000 grant from the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, and the Slidell City Council appropriated the rest.

Gorman said the original cost of the building was slated at $1.9 million, but the department saved money by using trusty labor from the jail. Private contractors were used for the steel frame, air conditioning system, elevator and security systems. Trusties built the rest.

“We have a lot of talent there,” Drennan said. He said one of the trusties who worked on the building was an electrical engineer.

For Drennan, one of the best things about the new facility is the entire department is now located on one site. After the hurricane, the evidence offices, crime scene unit and other departments were located all over the city.

Drennan also said the new building will ease the crowding in the main building where departments were “double-bunked,” causing space problems.

“It’s great to have everybody under the same roof now,” Drennan said.