Opinion ID: 3061767
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Search of 878 Rock Street Residence

Text: On January 9, 2004, law enforcement officers executed a search warrant on a residence at 878 Rock Street, Atlanta, Georgia. The building was composed of separate apartments, and the officers searched Apartment B. Before executing the search warrant, law enforcement officers observed several adults go in and out of Apartment B. Officers had to go through a “burglar-bar door” that had a hole in the mesh of the door. Officers entered Apartment B, found a group of individuals in the living room, and observed drugs and drug paraphernalia, primarily marijuana. Defendant Parks was in the kitchen and was arrested. The officers also secured four women present in the living room, including two minors. Law enforcement officers searched Defendant Parks and found: (1) $3,900 in cash; (2) a small pill bottle containing 36-39 small, yellow, plastic zip-lock bags containing a white powder believed to be cocaine; (3) a set of keys; and (4) additional small zip-lock bags. Law enforcement officers did not find a wallet on Parks. Subsequent laboratory tests revealed the bags in the Parks’s pill bottle 2 contained 2.8 grams of cocaine. Law enforcement officers continued searching Apartment B. In the living room, they found a plastic bag containing what laboratory tests later revealed to be 137.4 grams of marijuana. The officers also found a small gram scale. Officers saw a small “trail” from the bedroom to the bathroom of what looked like small pieces of crack cocaine, later determined to be 0.78 grams of crack. In the sink in the bathroom, officers found single-edged razor blades and additional pieces of suspected crack cocaine. Atlanta Police Department (“APD”) Investigator William Gilmore searched the apartment’s bedroom and found a locked safe under the bed or near the back part of the bedroom. The keys found on Defendant Parks did not include a key to the safe. Investigator Gilmore forced the safe open. In the safe were a wallet, a plastic bag containing what appeared to be a brick of powdered cocaine, and 43 rounds of ammunition for .357 and .38 caliber handguns. The wallet contained a driver’s license card issued to Defendant Parks, a health system identification card issued to Parks, some shopping advantage cards issued to Parks, an expired temporary driver’s license issued to Parks, a money order bearing the address of 878 Rock Street, and a personal note addressed to “Willie.” Defendant Parks was taken into custody on the same day as the search of 878 Rock Street. 3 After searching Apartment B, Investigator Gilmore placed the wallet and the other items recovered into a sealed property envelope that he turned over to the APD property section. Before he did so, a photograph was taken of the open safe, showing its contents, including the wallet. Investigator Gilmore’s property evidence inventory report after Parks’s arrest did not indicate the existence of a wallet in the safe, which Gilmore later described as an “omission.” However, Gilmore’s summary narrative in his incident report did mention that a “billfold” belonging to Parks was found in the safe. The search warrant return inventory also indicated that a wallet containing Parks’s identification was seized during the search. Sometime after the search, Investigator Gilmore signed out the wallet and its contents from the APD property section for various hearings and proceedings. At Parks’s trial, Gilmore testified that he inadvertently sealed the wallet with some other records in a box in his possession and for a time believed the wallet had been destroyed. Records from the APD property section also indicated that a wallet from this investigation had been destroyed. Sometime after Parks’s arrest, Investigator Gilmore informed Regina Cannon Stephenson, Parks’s original attorney, that the wallet found in the safe had been destroyed. Attorney Stephenson’s investigator also searched for the wallet at the APD inventory room 4 and could not locate it. Gilmore retired from the APD in 2007. Four days after the search of Apartment B, Gilmore and other law enforcement officers executed another search warrant on a U-Haul storage unit, numbered 4905 and located at 300 Peter Street in Atlanta, Georgia. The trial evidence showed that Defendant Parks entered into a rental contract for this storage unit on August 29, 2002 and continued to rent the unit up to and through the date of the search on January 13, 2004. The only other person on the rental agreement was Mary Parks, Defendant Parks’s mother. In the storage unit, law enforcement officers found two .38 caliber revolvers, a .357 revolver, and a .25 caliber semiautomatic pistol. Parks was in custody between January 9, 2004 and January 13, 2004. Under the rental agreement, only Parks and his mother had access to the storage unit. According to the trial testimony of a representative from the U-Haul storage facility, each storage unit has two locks. One lock is owned by the renter, and one lock is owned by U-Haul. In order to access a storage unit, therefore, a renter must present identification at the U-Haul counter to obtain the key that unlocks the U-Haul lock on the storage unit and bring his own separate key to open the renter’s lock. The rental facility employee testified that individuals other than Parks and his mother made rental payments for the unit, but they would not have 5 been allowed to access the unit. The rental facility employee also testified that if an individual accompanied Parks or his mother to the rental facility, they would have been allowed to go to the unit with Parks or his mother. The storage facility does not keep records of people who appear to go into the storage facility.