ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, February 20, 1996 TAG: 9602200068
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BEDFORD
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
WHAT TOOK THREE DECADES for the Bedford County Sheriff's Office to accumulate took about a minute to melt, as authorities found an answer to their storage problems.
The rows of old rifles stacked outside the truck looked like they were waiting for a discount sale or a rematch at the Alamo.
But these weapons - more than 200 guns and knives and even a sword - were destined for a date with the furnace Monday.
When Mike Brown took over the county's top law enforcement job this year, he inherited the weapons - and a lot of other evidence that piled up in every nook and cranny of the Sheriff's Office during the 22-year tenure of his predecessor, Carl Wells.
Wells apparently had no policy for getting rid of weapons or evidence, so they continued to pile up.
State law once allowed sheriffs and police departments to sell confiscated weapons, but nowadays there are only two options: Destroy them by melting or adapt them to law-enforcement use, at the discretion of the local judge.
Some of the pieces in the Sheriff's Office were in good enough condition to keep, but the rest were a pretty motley bunch: old sawed-off shotguns, worn-out pistols, and illegally altered semiautomatics.
One particularly sorry-looking handgun was held together with foam rubber and duct tape. "You know you got a prize on your hands here," remarked Sgt. Rick Wiita.
Sorting through the pile, Wiita extracted a mean-looking gun that had been modified into a fully automatic machine gun with silencer.
"With this suppressor, literally the only sound you'll hear is the bolt sliding back and forth," he said. "These are a favored weapon of drug dealers. They're not a good shot, but you can spray the daylights out of somebody with it."
Before the weapons could be destroyed, Wiita had to try to identify them. Most of the items had no identification tags and no paperwork. In the end, only about half were identified.
Some yielded interesting stories. An old sword that was thought to have been used in an attack on a deputy actually turned out to be confiscated from a group of Satan worshippers who used it in their rituals.
Others were less exotic, ranging from the burglars' tools to suicide weapons.
After the weapons were stacked in the truck, Brown, Wiita, and Lt. John McCane took them to Wheelabrator Abrasives, a Bedford company that offered to destroy the weapons free.
Without ceremony, the weapons were thrown onto the dirt floor of the factory's smelting room. Then a huge overhead magnet lowered to the pile of guns and picked them up like iron shavings on a toy magnet and dropped them into the furnace.
Sparks flew, pipes convulsed and ducts moved as the furnace banged and belched fire.
"Mike, I'd say in less than a minute, everything you got will be inoperable," Wheelabrator shift supervisor Joe Hancock said to the sheriff.
"Yeah, I reckon so," Brown said, watching the guns turning into 3,050-degree liquid metal. It will be recycled into a material used to clean steel.
Melting the weapons guarantees they won't be used in more crimes.
Law officers used to be allowed to cut up confiscated weapons with a torch, "but too many of those weapons were ending up back on the streets with a different barrel," said Brown, a former agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
The melted-down weapons also mean more storage space for Brown's overcrowded office. Shortly before he took the weapons to be destroyed, he also oversaw the destruction of 500 to 600 pounds of marijuana and jugs of moonshine that for years had been haphazardly stored in a crowded garage outside the Sheriff's Office.
Now the garage is being converted into offices, lab space, an interrogation room and an evidence lock-up for investigators. Inmates skilled in carpentry are volunteering on the project, meaning less cost to the Sheriff's Office, Brown said.
Evidence collected will now be labeled with a bar code and scanned into a computer inventory.
Brown doesn't think there will be another weapon melt-down like this one any time soon.
"This is an accumulation of 30 years," Brown said. "Everything being relative, some bigger departments probably seize this much in a month, but I don't think we'll be able to [destroy batches of weapon] more than every few months.''
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN/Staff. 1. Weapons confiscated during theby CNBpast 30 years by the Bedford County Sheriff's Office approach their
final resting place just before a giant magnet at Wheelabrator
Abrasives drops them into a furnace. 2. Sgt. Rick Wiita (left) and
Lt. John McCane unload an assortment of weapons to be melted down to
a material that will be used to clean steel. More than 200 guns,
knives and even a sword were melted. color.