New Orleans court officials search landfill for records tossed by City Hall

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Days after the Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal Court admonished City Hall for relocating hundreds of court records without proper notice, staffers upped their search Tuesday to a local landfill.

Clerk Darren Lombard said city workers were told by Public Works Director Rick Hathaway to move official court documents — including murder and rape cases dating back to the 1950s — from the shoddy containers and office trailers where they’d been stored for years to a Department of Public Works yard.

After learning that at least one container had been thrown away, along with other debris, Lombard got permission from the Gentilly landfill owner to search for the files with his staff.

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“They figured we would never find anything,” Lombard said of the landfill site workers, who assisted in the search with an excavator. ”We're retrieving a significant amount of them [files,] but I doubt we'll be able to get them all.”

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