Code Storage for Hot Items : Evidence: Sheriff’s Department will use computerized, bar-code scanners to keep track of 103,000 property items.

You’ve seen them for years at your grocery checkout counter. Now computerized, bar-code scanners have hit the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, as authorities prepare to tag and catalogue everything from drugs and bullet-riddled doors to serial killer Randy Kraft’s old rugs.

Under a $40,385 contract approved Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors, the county will use the scanners to label and track 103,000 items of criminal evidence and property that are held at burgeoning storage areas at the jail complex and at two Santa Ana warehouses.

Authorities predict that coding sawed-off shotguns like canned peas in the supermarket will allow them to save hours in keeping track of stored items. It could also help avoid potential embarrassment if evidence were misplaced among myriad boxes, bags and belongings, they said.

“I’ve got pieces of airplanes, wings, parts of engines from planes where dope smugglers have crashed in the desert,” said Capt. Jack De Vereaux, who oversees the sheriff’s 10-person property detail. “I’ve got motorcycles, I’ve got doors with bullet holes in them. You name it.”

As the captain runs through the inventory, he sounds a bit like a salesman for Orange County’s biggest garage sale. In fact, the Sheriff’s Department used to auction some of its cache until several years ago, when the process became too costly and time-consuming, officials said.

Guns, drugs and other evidence seized by deputies as part of criminal investigations make up more than 90% of the items in storage. The warehouses also house prisoners’ belongings that are too big for jail storage, along with lost items that are turned in to authorities.

The warehouse is a virtual armory with everything from guns--more than 2,000 in all--to crossbows, knives, baseball bats, tear gas cartridges and Molotov cocktail components.

Drug paraphernalia are well represented as well, along with such assorted items as stuffed animals, furs, even body parts stored in formaldehyde. Drugs and cash are locked in vaults at the warehouse.

Competing for the title as oddest item in the warehouse are a 150-year-old American Indian skeleton found in a coffin in a county resident’s living room, and a life-size plastic cow that was dumped in a cul-de-sac. Both were held in storage until a few years ago, officials said, when the skeleton was moved to the coroner’s office and the cow became an ornament at the James A. Musick branch jail.

The skeleton “was kind of eerie,” said Sgt. Don Creel, immediate supervisor of the properties detail. “But after a while, anything strange is ordinary to us.”

In just the past five years, the number of items stored by the Sheriff’s Department has grown nearly fourfold, officials said, despite efforts to limit the glut. About 100 items are taken in each day and authorities try immediately to dispose of half of them. (Most drugs and guns are destroyed after criminal cases are completed.)

To contend with the storage and inventory problem, officials considered a rotating shelf system, but ruled that out as too costly. Instead, they hit on the bar-coding system.

First patented in 1952, the technology has become widespread in both the private and public sectors in recent years.

De Vereaux acknowledges that the Sheriff’s Department is not exactly on the cutting edge in adopting it. “I’d like to say we’ve waited until it was stable (technology), but I think we’ve waited long past that,” he said.

Officials said the system is timed to coincide with the move of some sheriff’s services--including property storage--into a new building across the street from the sheriff’s headquarters.

Employees will be computer-coding each of the 103,000 items as they are moved in weeks ahead. De Vereaux said he hopes to complete the process by the end of the year. Supplying the equipment will be Ex-Cel Solutions of Nebraska, whose $40,385 bid was lowest by about $4,000.

The main advantage of using bar-coding to catalogue items in a computer, said Assistant Sheriff Walter Fath, “is time savings and control. . . . You know exactly to the second when that property was released and to whom, and you retain a chain of custody on evidence.”

Asked about the theft of drugs in storage, Fath said it has not been “a major problem,” but added: “Everyone’s had the problem over the years. . . . It happens.” He said he was aware of one instance in the last few years in which drugs were stolen from storage, but could not provide details.

A more frequent problem has been the misplacing of evidence.

Tom Borris, a former deputy district attorney who is now in private practice, said that in his dealings with various local police agencies, “the Sheriff’s Department was the best as far as keeping track of evidence.”

But a current prosecutor recounted a murder trial several years ago in which a key piece of evidence--a bar of soap with a hair on it--was missing just before its introduction at trial, jeopardizing his case.

“It looked bleak, and I mean bleak,” said the prosecutor, who asked not to be identified. “Then right at the last minute, they found it. But I was ready to kiss that case goodby.”

Perhaps the most notorious instance of missing evidence in Orange County came in 1988 in the case of Randy Kraft, who was sentenced to death for the murders of 16 men.

In one instance, a Sheriff’s Department crime-lab technician left a body bag and other evidence against Kraft on a roof to get rid of the stench, but it blew away. In another, the department inadvertently destroyed evidence against Kraft during a routine purging of old storage items. Kraft’s attorneys tried to get four murder counts thrown out as a result, but were unsuccessful.