Odd, Dangerous Confiscated Courthouse Items

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Knives, guns, a knife made to look like a gun, lipstick blades, key blades, that tooth scraping thing a dentist uses, ninja stars, nunchucks, even furry handcuffs.

All of it, people tried to bring inside the Mecklenburg County Courthouse.

All of it, banned.

Mecklenburg County Sheriff Irwin Carmichael says, “We had up to 1.2 million people come through the courthouse in a year and we’ve stopped over 15,000 contraband items from coming into the courthouse.”

His department maintains what is best described as a “Wall of Shame” display board, which showcases some of the most outrageous items collected since 1995.

And the hits just keep on coming. Captain Charles Yongue showed WCCB Charlotte the barrel his deputies fill up every few months, full of dangerous stuff. WCCB News @ Ten anchor Morgan Fogarty said of one benign looking item, “That’s a nice cane.” The Captain unscrewed the top of the cane to reveal a sharp blade, “It’s a dagger.”

Yongue says the most common items his deputies catch are box cutters. There are also lots of full-sized scissors in the barrel right now, metal hair combs and picks, pepper spray, even a kitchen knife.

People have different reactions when a deputy confiscates a banned item. Yongue says, “Some of ’em act shocked. Some of ’em, you know, we always get they ‘didn’t know’ they had it on ’em.”

Since January, Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Deputies have stopped 1,819 blades from entering the courthouse, 42 bullets, 21 stun guns, 156 pepper-spray type items, 245 tools and more.

Often, people who try to sneak banned items into the courthouse go outside and try to hide them in the bushes nearby, so they can retrieve them later. The deputies see that, come out here and take it right from the bush to the bin, because those bushes are still on courthouse property.

People cannot get their stuff back. Once it ends up in the barrel, it eventually gets melted down.

Deputies get on-going training to keep their confiscation skills sharp. Carmichael says, “This is what we do and it’s about keeping the community safe and we wanna keep our facility safe.”

Sheriff’s Deputies also have to keep contraband out of the hands of Mecklenburg County jail inmates. So far this year, they’ve confiscated 452 items from inmates, including 13 weapons.