While Jack Nicholson spent much of The Departed trying to uncover a rat in his crew, the Houston Police Department is dealing with a literal rat.
As reported by ABC affiliate KTRK, rats made their way into the Houston PD Narcotics Evidence Room, where they proceeded to eat drug evidence.
The vault holds evidence related to 3,600 open cases, though Harris County District Attorney Office General Counsel Joshua Reiss says that evidence was compromised in only one case.
“It was a very large drug case involving cocaine, marijuana, and PCP and the rodents got into one envelope of psychedelic mushrooms and that packaging was eaten into,” Reiss says. “This is an issue dealing with the integrity of the packaging, not the integrity of the convictions or the cases themselves. I think that’s important.”
Houston Mayor John Whitmire was able to find humor in the situation, declaring, “We’ve got 400,000 pounds of marijuana in storage that the rats are the only ones enjoying.”
Frankly, this all sounds like the origin story of Master Splinter. We’ll know if teenage mutant ninja turtles start popping up in Texas.