Chief Craft Describes Magnitude Of The Shunick Investigation – Lafayette Live

With City-Parish President Joey Durel out of town, Police Chief Jim Craft stopped by "Mornings with Ken and Bernie" today for our weekly "Lafayette Live" segment.

The topic of the day was the aftermath of the recent Mickey Shunick investigation that captured the attention of the community like nothing we've ever seen before. Chief Craft was full of superlatives when describing the tireless effort put in by law enforcement, volunteers, and the community at large during the multi-month investigation.

Chief Craft attempted to give us an idea of the amount of work that went into the massive investigation,

The scope of this investigation was just so large and took place over a lot of different areas in this state and other states. We compiled some of the numbers we developed as a result of the investigation:

During the course of the investigation we received 1199 tips. Almost 1200 tips that came in from email, telephone, hot lines.

The task force review a total of 12660 license plates that were sent in as result of the investigation.

When we did make the arrest and we confiscated the defendant's phone, we identified, researched, and investigated 9063 phone numbers on the suspects cell phone.

We obtained 36 search warrants because of different locations in the state and in Texas.

We obtained 15 court orders.

We collected and processed 336 items of evidence.

We canvased 354 businesses to obtain the few seconds of video we have on the truck, and actually our best video comes from city hall.

The total cost of those services would have been somewhere between $60-75,000

Our own Acadiana Ambulance put one of their air-med helicopters at our disposal to help with an arial search of Whiskey Bay.

We logged over 10,000 hours on this case.

Chief Craft was very proud of the effort put in by his staff and the law enforcement agencies that contributed, but he reserved a special praise for the unprecedented outpouring of support from the community throughout the entire trying ordeal.

We live in such a giving and charitable community, and in this particular case, we've never seen it come together in that way. It was amazing to see how many people came together.

I'm fixing to go on 36 years, and I've never seen the community effort that went on during this case.