By Aaron Lee

Published: March 19, 2008

VIDEO: JUNK CARS

Deputy Joe Flamini was handed a lot of scrap in his first week with the Nelson County Sheriff’s Office.

Recently hired as an evidence technician, Flamini was assigned to get rid of eight vehicles — once evidence in criminal cases — parked in a chain-link pen near the sheriff’s office.

Even among the department’s veterans there isn’t an institutional memory of when some of the cars were used as evidence.

Flamini said he chased a family of raccoons out of one car and discovered another vehicle by running into it with his knee as he cut through brush and weeds.

“Evidence is a lot easier to accumulate than it is to get rid of,” Flamini said. “You can’t just throw it away, you have to have a court order.”

An advertisement was recently placed in the Nelson County Times asking anyone who can prove a claim to any of the cars to contact the sheriff’s office.

Otherwise, Flamini said, the lot of cars will likely be bid out to scrap metal dealers.

The chain link fence may be bid out along with the cars, Flamini said.

“Those are what I call ‘archeological cars,’” he said. “They belong to a previous eon. Those are so old they really have no redeemable value.”

One of the cars, a rusted-out Oldsmobile, is part of the still-open investigation into the death of Clemente Macedo, 39, who was found burned to death inside in 2001.

Removing the cars are part of Sheriff David Brooks’ effort to purge the office of evidence that is no longer of any use in investigations — like drugs and guns that have languished in the department’s evidence rooms for decades.

That’s in addition to a possible auction by the end of summer to sell roughly a dozen other vehicles — that appear to be in working order – that were seized during other investigations.

That lot includes an RV seized after a deputy spotted a mobile meth lab in it and a Chevrolet Caprice with a chameleon paint job that appears to change colors when viewed from different angles.

It’s also a part of a preemptive strike to make room for planned renovations to the courthouse complex the sheriff’s office is part of.

The land the scrap cars occupy will eventually be part of an expansion to the complex’s parking lot.

“If they had the room they would keep evidence from 1807 when the county was founded,” Investigator and evidence technician M.E. Bridgwater, in his 14th year at the sheriff’s office, joked.