Crash sends Nassau crime files 'flying'

A truck carrying 450 boxes of the Nassau district attorney's office's criminal files to a storage facility in Pennsylvania slammed into an overpass on the Southern State Parkway Monday, ripping the roof off the truck and spewing enough documents onto the roadway to close it for more than three hours.

Even after the highway reopened about 4 p.m., some 30 district attorney and public works employees continued to troll the grassy area around the highway looking for old police reports, crime scene photos, trial transcripts and other documents.

"Records were flying all over the Southern State," said Nassau County Clerk Maureen O'Connell, who maintains the county's records. "People were running around, trying to pick up records in the easements."

The westbound box truck hit an overpass near Exit 18 in Hempstead just before 1 p.m., state police said. No one was hurt in the crash, state police said.

John Byrne, a spokesman for Nassau District Attorney Kathleen Rice, said his office is required by law to maintain files for 25 years after a case is concluded. He said the records being sent to Pennsylvania were for closed cases.

In any event, he said, most of the records were found.

"At this point it appears that almost all the documents from these closed cases were recovered," said Byrne, who went to the scene of the crash to view the damage.

The recovered documents were loaded on to other trucks and removed from the scene, Byrne said.

The boxes were being moved from a county storage facility on Cooper Street to Rapid Refile, a storage center in Pennsylvania. The county secured a grant to move the files after a recent flood soaked some of the documents at the Cooper Street location, O'Connell said.

A spokesman for Rapid Refile did not return a call seeking comment Monday.

Trucks are not allowed on the parkway; the state Department of Transportation has said that at least a dozen incidents, on average, happen each month involving trucks.

A state police spokesman said there was no damage to the overpass and the truck's driver, who was not identified, faced only a traffic citation. Neither police nor the district attorney's office could say to whom the truck was licensed.