This weapon has way too much DNA on it.
Prosecutors can’t show jurors the broken kitchen knife at the center of an ongoing Manhattan murder trial — because it was contaminated with e-coli and other toxins after Hurricane Sandy flooded an evidence warehouse with ten feet of filthy water.
The knife was used by jealous husband Michael Kenny in admittedly stabbing his beautician wife to death in her Garment District salon two years ago; it is one of tens of thousands of pieces of crime scene evidence citywide that remains locked away in two toxic, quarantined warehouses thanks to the October Frankenstorm.
Barred from retrieving the knife from storage, prosecutors in the Kenny case could only show jurors an evidence photo of the knife, along with another, store-bought knife that looks like the real thing.
The actual knife remains locked away in the federally-quarantined Kingsland Warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, contaminated by heavy metals, PCBs and e-coli, Sgt. John Capozzi told jurors last week.
The warehouse is surrounded by a scrap yard, a sewage waste plant, an oil facility and Newtown Creek, which was already a federal Superfund waste site. “They had to be rescued by boat,” the sergeant told jurors of the contingent of cops who’d been guarding the warehouse last October, when the slime surged in.
The physical knife — which cracked into three pieces as Kenny, 45, plunged it ten times into Denise Kenny’s chest — is not critical to the murder case. Kenny admits he stabbed his wife, and has gone to trial in hopes of being convicted of a lesser charge of manslaughter due to his alleged “emotional disturbance” at the time of the slaying.
Still, defense lawyer Kevin Canfield has complained that prosecutors should pay some price at trial for the missing evidence. “It seems judges have been bending over backwards to call this an act of nature, and say there’s no harm done, and allow in just photographs,” said Canfield, who last month tried another Manhattan murder in which DNA evidence was destroyed by Sandy.
“My sense is, they should be putting evidence in a more secure place.”
Some 12,000 barrels of evidence have been contaminated by Sandy’s toxic flooding of the Kingsland warehouse and another in Erie Basin in Red Hook. Most of the evidence had been swabbed and photographed prior to storage, officials have said.