11/3/2009
ERIN MATHEWS
The rumor has always been that Indian Rock Park lake was bottomless, so perhaps that’s why it seemed like a good place to dispose of criminal evidence.
Two complete firearms and parts of a third were retrieved from the lake during a search that concluded Monday involving deputies from the Saline County Mounted Patrol and Rescue Squad and Salina police officers, Salina Deputy Police Chief Carson Mansfield said today.
One of the weapons — a stainless steel .22-caliber Ruger handgun that had been reported stolen — is being processed in connection with a criminal investigation, Mansfield said. He declined to provide any more specific information.
Mansfield showed media representatives the two other weapons found. One was an illegal sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun, which he said probably had not been in the lake long despite its corroded appearance because the leather casing on the handle was still intact.
The second was the frame and cylinder from a revolver that had been taken apart before it was thrown into the lake, where it appears to have stayed for some years, he said.
“We will have crime analysis go back through and see if we can tie them in to any cases,” he said.
Mansfield said police approached the city engineering department about the possibility of pumping down the lake after a previous search using rescue squad divers was thwarted by cattails and other growth in and around the pond.
“We kept getting reports of evidence thrown into that pond, so we got with engineering to see what it would take to pump it down,” he said.
Parks department officials, who were interested in cleaning up and restocking the lake, agreed to participate in the project. City crews pumped down the water in the lake Wednesday, and law enforcement officers searched the lake bottom with a water-proof metal detector to retrieve the weapons, as well as a PDA, a cell phone and other items.


Read more about the items found in the lake in Wednesday's Salina Journal.