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The district attorney’s office had reached out to the homicide detective on the case Thursday to confirm all evidence was available for trial, the police department said in a statement. The detective said he would need more time to confirm.
By the time the detective confirmed all the evidence was available, at 9:50 a.m. Thursday according to police, the district attorney’s office had to file a motion of continuance.
On Friday evening, Police Sgt. Warren Mitchell said that “all the evidentiary items and data are available for prosecution on this murder case.”
White granted Pitts release without paying bail because state law requires a person be freed on bond if prosecutors aren’t ready at the time of the trial, his defense attorney, George Ashford III, told The Dallas Morning News. The paper first reported Pitt’s so-called personal recognizance bond.
Mayor Eric Johnson said the release underscored the seriousness of the data loss.
“The people of Dallas deserve answers about what happened, why top city staff kept it quiet for months, and what can be done to resolve these critical issues that affect public safety,” Johnson said in a statement.
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City information technology officials became aware of the problem on April 5. But the police and city IT departments did not reveal it to the district attorney’s office until last Friday, after prosecutors inquired why they could not find computer files on pending cases.
The lost data included images, video, audio, case notes and other information gathered by officers and detectives, police said in an earlier statement. A city IT employee was moving the files, which had not been accessed for the previous six to 18 months, from an online, cloud-based archive to a server at the city’s data center. The “employee failed to follow proper, established procedures, resulting in the deletion of the data files,” police said.
Ashford did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
