BELFAST, Maine — The Waldo County Sheriff’s Department is investigating whether some old evidence that was supposed to have been disposed of in a landfill ended up in the hands of the public.
Sheriff Scott Story said detectives have determined that pocketknives and marijuana pipes were included in the refuse that left the department in a trash container last week. He stressed that rumors about drugs or firearms being included in the trash were false. Evidence of that nature is kept in secure areas, he said.
Story said the department cleaned out the attic over the barn at the county jail last week and that items such as bicycle parts, clothing, footwear, marijuana paraphernalia and a few knives were included in the trash. Story said he had received assurances from county facilities manager Keith Nealley that the trash would be dumped at a landfill. Instead, the trash can was unloaded at the Winterport Transfer Station and apparently picked over by employees there.
“We were told it was going to a landfill and that it would be buried,” Story said Thursday. “We got a tip on Tuesday that some items had made it out into the public. We immediately sent a team of investigators and learned that unfortunately some items had been sorted and looked through by some employees up there.”
Story said the detectives learned that an old gas mask and a pocketknife had left the landfill. He said investigators still were following up on rumors that other items might have been removed as well.
“The bottom line is that we’re still following up on everything we are hearing on it,” Story said. “It’s frustrating to me because our intent was that this stuff got dumped and was not to get picked over.”
Facilities manager Nealley said he was as surprised as the sheriff was when he learned the trash did not end up in a landfill. He said that when he disposed of demolition and construction waste on other occasions, the material had been buried.
“That’s what I fully expected to happen in this case,” Nealley said Thursday.