Imagine being in charge of 23,000 pieces of evidence that have been collected from various crimes and will be used in a courtroom during a trial.

That’s the job for Debbie McCormick, evidence custodian and crime scene technician for the Slidell Police Department.

McCormick has to catalog, store and retrieve all sorts of evidence from documents to drugs and bullets to bags. She also has to make sure the evidence remains secure and untouched until the day it goes to court.

Evidence Custodian and Crime Scene Technician Debbie McCormick shows off the new evidence room shelves that she has to maintain for the Slidell Police Department (Staff Photo by Erik Sanzenbach)

“I really enjoy it,” McCormick said. “They will have to bomb me out of here.”

She has a lot to celebrate these days. She and her piles of evidence have moved to the new Evidence and Administration Building behind the main police headquarters building on Third Street in Slidell.

For the past three years, McCormick and a crew of three have been laboriously, painstakingly reconstituting over 18,000 pieces of evidence damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

The storm flooded out the original evidence room. McCormick had to take all that sodden evidence and place it in refrigerated trailers so the moisture would be wicked away.

Then, dressed in biohazard suits, McCormick and three police officers went into the trailers and carefully cleaned up the evidence. After that, the evidence was taken to a specially fortified trailer in an undisclosed location and stored until needed.

McCormick is proud to say not one trial was lost due to the damage done to evidence. McCormick and her team were able to reconstitute 18,900 pieces of evidence to such a condition it could be used in a courtroom.

Now all the evidence is in one place, and McCormick happily opens and closes the high-tech movable shelves that line the new evidence room.

McCormick is no stranger to keeping track of records. Before working for the SPD, she was the commander of records for the St. Tammany Sheriff’s Office. She worked there for 35 years under three different sheriffs. When Police Chief Freddie Drennan left the Sheriff’s Office to lead the Slidell Police Department, he asked McCormick to go with him, even though she was retiring from the Sheriff’s Office.

“I really enjoy this. I don’t really need a job because I get full retirement from the Sheriff’s Office, but I just like the work,” McCormick said. She added the best thing about the job is working with Drennan.

Not only does McCormick have to keep the evidence cataloged and ordered, she spends a lot of time in the courtrooms testifying about the chain of evidence and how evidence is stored.

She has one other job. She is a crime scene technician and sometimes has to go to a crime scene and collect evidence.

“There are days when she has to collect the evidence and then catalog it,” Drennan said. “She does it all.”

But keeping the evidence in order is not the hardest part of the job, according to McCormick. Getting rid of old evidence presents a particular challenge for her. Even in the new offices, there is just so much room. When a trial is completed, she has to ask the district attorney or the city prosecutor for permission to destroy evidence.

“That can be a bit difficult and take some time,” McCormick said.

When finally given permission, all metal evidence has to be melted and everything else is incinerated so she has room for the constant influx of evidence.

She said the most common type of evidence is documents and CDs. She said the strangest piece of evidence she has stored is ashes from a cremation.