A shot rang out inside the Akron Police Department headquarters after boxes of seized guns and loose ammunition slipped off a detective’s cart and hit the ground earlier this year. Nobody was harmed in the July 31 incident.
An incident report and photographs obtained by Signal Akron state the accidental discharge in the Harold K. Stubbs Justice Center occurred when Det. Doug Matson was wheeling a cart of “12 boxes of swabbed firearms” from the crime scene unit to the test fire lab. That’s when things went awry.
“As I attempted to lift the cart wheels over a concrete ramp bump in the stations basement parking lot area, (4) of the firearm boxes began to slide off the cart,” Matson wrote. “As I attempted to grab them, (2) of the firearm boxes fell and struck the concrete and a loud bang was heard.”
APD spokesperson Captain Michael Miller explained to Signal Akron that the detective had to wheel the cart the “long way” from the crime scene unit on the third floor of the Stubbs building to the test fire lab in the basement because the employee-only elevator was not working.
That meant Matson had to wheel the cart with all the guns to the main elevator, take it down to the lobby and outside of the building and enter the headquarters again through the sallyport — a secured entrance — to the garage, where he could access the test fire lab in the basement.
The incident occurred on a ramp in the garage — if the employee’s elevator had been operable, it would have gone directly to Matson’s destination, without the more convoluted route.
“Working and functional elevators have been an ongoing issue,” Miller said of the dilapidated Stubbs building. The city is weighing whether to update or relocate from the current police headquarters.
Matson, another detective and a sergeant found a bullet hole in the cardboard gun box and located the bullet and its casing 10 to 15 feet away. The gun — a Springfield Hellcat micro-compact 9mm pistol seized from a convicted felon in June, according to the evidence number listed on the box — had not been loaded, the detective said.
Matson reasoned that the incident was the result of the unloaded gun striking a loose live round after the box slipped off the cart.
“After opening the box, it was determined that when the box hit the ground, the empty firearm had shifted and struck a bag of loose ammunition included with it,” he wrote. “It appeared the front end of the firearm had struck one of the cartridges primer with just enough force to cause the round to detonate.”
The explanation is plausible. This 2019 video from a Wisconsin gun range shows a live round detonating after a customer accidentally drops a box of ammo on the floor. “This is so rare (none of us had ever seen it before) we wanted to share it,” they wrote in the video description.
Signal Akron obtained the photographs taken by the other detective of the gun in its box surrounded by loose ammunition, as well as photographs of the bullet hole in the box, the bullet itself and its casing on the ground.
Matson said the sergeant he was with notified a lieutenant about the incident “shortly afterwards,” and Matson wrote the narrative for the incident report nine days later, on Aug. 8.
