Urban Warrior | Foul turn in missing-CD mixer saga

WE GATHER today to enjoy a magic show, courtesy of the Philadelphia Police Department

Behold - the mysterious vanishing DJ equipment.

Abracadabra!

I can joke because Brian Lewis survived this trick.

In early April, I told you his harrowing story with what appeared to be a happy ending.

Lewis was on his way to a disc jockey gig in 2005, when he was jumped outside his Ivy Hill home by a trio of armed robbers who wanted his two CD mixers, worth $499 each.

Lewis, who had a permit to carry a pistol, exchanged gunfire with the robbers. He was shot but managed to wound one of his assailants and kill another.

The last time Lewis saw his CD mixers, they were on his front lawn with the dead robber.

Homicide detectives later said he had been justified in defending himself and assured him his equipment was collected as evidence.

Lewis called me in late March to say the Police Department had not responded to his many requests for more than two years to return his equipment.

Capt. Ben Naish of the department's public-affairs office checked the story and then told me the homicide investigators remembered the equipment and would be able to return it to Lewis within a week. The investigators even recalled the equipment was splattered with blood during the gunbattle.

But Lewis continued to have trouble getting the Police Department to return his CD mixers.

Now we know why.

The Police Department's explanation was a moving target last week, as new details emerged.

First, officers who secured the crime scene said they took photographs of the CD mixers and then put them inside Lewis' house.

Then, other officers said they didn't go inside the house but a man who claimed to be a friend or family member offered to take the CD mixers after Lewis was on his way to the hospital. The cops have no idea who this guy was.

Finally, a supervisor at the crime scene remembers the guy showed up to take the equipment and let the officers inside the house to make sure everything was OK there.

For Lewis, that evolving story is three swings and a strike-out.

No one he knows claimed his equipment, Lewis insists.

"They allow people to walk up to a major crime scene where there is a dead body on the ground and just hand stuff away to them?" Lewis asked of the cops. "It took them two and a half years to come up with that story? That is unbelievable."

For Lewis, the anger is mixed with anxiety because he dropped his .40-caliber pistol after being shot. Is that missing too?

Naish says that gun and two others from the assailants were booked into evidence and are still held by the department.

So what are we to believe about the missing CD mixers?

Did someone who knew Lewis steal his equipment while he was on his way to the hospital?

Did the crime scene cops get taken by a brazen con man?

Does some cop swipe the stuff for a nice home stereo set-up?

Without answers, I next turned to City Solicitor Romulo Diaz to see what Lewis can do now. Diaz's office deals with financial claims for problems caused by city employees, say for instance, $1,000 in missing DJ equipment last seen with cops at a crime scene.

Diaz said financial claims have to be filed within two years.

"I think he's out of luck here," Diaz told me after conferring with the Police Department.

So Lewis spends more than two years trying to reclaim his property because the cops told him they had it. And now he's out of luck because the cops switched the story and said they never had it.

Abracadabra!

That's sleight of hand that any magician can admire. *

E-mail urbanwarrior@phillynews.com or call the Urban Warrior tip line at 215-854-4810. For past columns:

http://go.philly.com/columnists.