Calls made approximately between June 14 and 21 are missing, leaving attorneys in some upcoming court cases without key evidence.

Defense attorney W. Theodore Koch said he learned of the missing recordings when he filed a motion in New London Superior Court seeking to preserve a recording of the 911 call made concerning his client, John Orr, on June 14.

City police charged Orr with breach of peace after staff at the Community Mental Health Center at Shaw's Cove called 911 to report that Orr, 58, of New London, was being “threatening and abusive toward staff,” according to his court file.

Judge James W. Abrams granted Koch's motion and ordered the police department to produce the recording, but police Capt. Michael Lacey said in a phone interview the department would not be able to comply.

The department's 911 calls are digitally recorded for 30 days on a hard-drive system, then they are removed from the hard drive and stored on a digital archive. The 30-day recording system worked but the archive did not, Lacey said, adding that he could not provide information on how many 911 calls might be missing or how many calls the city typically receives in a week.

“If he had requested it within 30 days, it would have been there,” he said of Koch's motion.

Lacey said he does not know the specifics of the malfunction or how many calls were involved.

“There was no human intervention whatsoever,” Lacey said. “It mechanically failed. Occasionally any system is going to have a failure.”

During the same time period, 23-year-old city resident Vernell Marshall was gunned down outside of Ernie's Café on Bank Street. The department has recordings of radio dispatches from the June 21 crime scene but does not have recordings of the 911 calls, Lacey said. The detective division is still investigating the shooting, and nobody has been charged.

Recordings of the 911 phone calls made in the wake of violent crimes often play a key role in court proceedings, including murder trials.

“The fact that they lost them is very serious,” said Attorney Mark S. Solak, who has practiced as both a prosecutor and a criminal defense lawyer.

“It's serious evidence,” he said. “It's a statement of a witness, and the defense is entitled to all statements of witnesses.”

Solak, who was the state's attorney for Windham County in the 1990s, said it is standard procedure for investigators to obtain copies of 911 records when homicides occur.

Lacey said he could not comment on why there were no copies of the 911 recordings preserved following the Marshall murder. He deferred questions to the department's detective captain, who was not available Monday. A representative of the New London State's Attorney's office declined to comment, saying the investigation is ongoing.

At trial, prosecutors often set the scene for jurors by playing the recorded 911 calls on the first day of testimony. The New London jury that convicted Brady Guilbert on two counts of murder earlier this year listened to several minutes of 911 calls and to recordings of police radio dispatches.

A year ago, the dramatic 911 calls made by the hysterical ex-wife of Kurtulus Kalican when Kalican came after the woman and her boyfriend with a gun helped convict Kalican of murdering his ex-wife's boyfriend, David Romero.