When traffic cop Steven Hodge saw Douglas Daniel driving without headlights after sunset, he signaled Daniel to pull over. It seemed to be just a routine incident on that February night in 1993.

It wasn't.

Daniel, 25, didn't stop. Instead, he led Hodge on a high-speed chase through Charlotte Amalie; it ended only when he ran a red light and hit another car.

Hodge then searched Daniel's Toyota Tercel. He spotted the butt of a 9 mm pistol under the driver's seat. Police ran a records check on the gun and got a surprise: It was the same weapon they had taken off a suspect a month earlier and placed in the St. Thomas police evidence room.

The gun had never been reported missing from the evidence room.

Investigators were even more surprised when they found out how Daniel, a plumber's assistant with an arrest record, got the gun.

Daniel was allowed unsupervised access to the evidence room to fix a leaking sewage pipe. While there, he helped himself to the gun.

He walked out with it, unnoticed. Nobody paid any attention to his coming and going.

That room in which Daniel freely moved about was the place where police held the evidence for hundreds of upcoming trials -- including dozens of homicide cases.

Law enforcement experts say that unauthorized access to evidence can easily affect the outcome of trials.

"Beyond the criminal act of the gun theft, this must surely be considered a major breach of security," says National Police Accreditation Board Chairman Ron Nelson, whose agency is evaluating the V.I. Police Department's request for accreditation -- a request that so far hasn't been approved.

"There was the potential for contamination of other evidence in the property room," Nelson says.

Daniel was convicted in April -- of traffic violations and illegal possession of a weapon -- and sentenced to six months in prison. Police never charged him with theft of the gun; the incident was swept under the departmental rug.

Lt. Elton Lewis, then head of the Police Department's Insular Affairs Unit, was in charge of the internal probe into how the gun left the evidence room. He recalls his findings as "troubling."

The Insular Affairs Unit recommended stiff disciplinary penalties against the officers in charge of the evidence room at the time -- but no action was taken, according to a former high-ranking officer in the unit.

Sgt. Liston Gumbs, who heads the Forensics Division and is the evidence room supervisor, says only that the officers assigned to the room "showed bad judgment." He says he wasn't on duty at the time and doesn't recall who was.

Police Commissioner Anthon Christian called the officers' actions "plain carelessness."

Careless and sloppy evidence-keeping nearly let convicted felon Roland Jones walk. Jones is serving a 10-year sentence in a federal prison for robbery, assault and gun possession.

Jones, who had a previous grand larceny conviction, nearly got off when police couldn't find the two guns seized from him at the time of his arrest.

Jones had robbed a Hospital Ground man of $600 at gunpoint. The victim called the police, but they never came.

So the victim, who had been hanging his mother's laundry at the time he was robbed, stormed down to the police station to make a report and complain about poor police service.

He got a big surprise. The man who had robbed him was right there, being booked -- but on a different charge.

"That's him! That's the man who robbed me!" the victim cried.

Police had picked up Jones on gun possession charges after stopping a car in which Jones and three other men were riding.

But when prosecutors asked police to produce the guns at trial, they could not. And although police knew the date of the trial weeks in advance, they made no effort to produce the weapons, prosecutors say.

In fact, it was only after a special search -- on the weekend before the case was to begin -- that Gumbs, the man in charge of Forensics and evidence, found the guns.

And evidence room blunders nearly allowed Mitchell "Sebo" Smalls -- described by an assistant U.S. attorney as one of the territory's biggest drug dealers -- to beat a gun rap in May.

Smalls was charged with gun possession in an Oct. 7, 1992, incident. Police Officer Roy Moorhead had chased Smalls down and recovered the gun that Smalls tossed into a pile of trash.

But even though police wanted Smalls behind bars and had even poked through trash and muck to find the weapon he threw away, they misplaced it.

Up to the very day of Smalls' trial, St. Thomas evidence room officers could not locate the .38-caliber revolver.

"We had to get the police chief (Raymond L. Hyndman) himself involved before the gun was found," says Valerie Collanton, a former assistant attorney general. "They couldn't find the gun, and this was a guy the police wanted off the streets."

Theft and mishandling of guns in the police evidence room are enduring problems. The Interior Department Inspector General's audit in January found that 34 weapons sent to the Forensics Division for analysis were missing.

At least two weapons that should have been in the room were found in the possession of criminals on the street.

"Because the control over confiscated property was lax, hundreds of items, including firearms, audiovisual equipment, cash, narcotics and other evidentiary material were subject to loss or theft," the Inspector General's report said.

"For example, in 30 of the 100 cases reviewed, confiscated property could not be located or accounted for."

One leading prosecutor in the Attorney General's Office, who asked not to be named for fear of professional reprisals, called the evidence room "a black hole into which evidence disappears and rarely returns."

For example, he said, he went to the room in search of evidence for one of his cases, evidence that should have been clearly marked, tagged and securely put away. But the woman working at the evidence room could not find it. She kept showing him the wrong items.

"It was like a guessing game. The lady was asking, 'Is this your evidence or is this it?' She really had no idea."