Ordered that the judgment is affirmed.
On June 27, 2002 police officers responded to a radio call and discovered a body lying near the rear fire exit door of a motel, covered in plastic bags. The victim’s hands and feet were bound together with a sheet, and ripped paper currency was attached to his body. Nearby, underneath the window of room 210 of the motel, the police discovered ripped clothing and more ripped paper currency. Inside the motel, they observed bloody drag marks leading to the area near room 210. When a detective approached room 210, he heard a television with the volume turned up loud, and after knocking on the door and not receiving a response, the detective had a motel employee open the door. Once inside the room, the detective saw ripped bed sheets, ripped currency, blood, and newspapers. After the room was secured, the crime scene unit seized these items within several hours of the detective’s initial entry. At the suppression hearing, the Supreme Court ruled that the entry and seizure was proper under the emergency exception to the warrant requirement.
From the time the Court of Appeals decided People v Mitchell (39 NY2d 173 [1976], cert denied 426 US 953 [1976]), our analysis of whether the police were presented with an emergency that permitted their warrantless entry and search of a protected area consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution has been governed by a three-prong test: whether (1) the police had reasonable grounds to believe that there was an emergency at hand and an immediate need for
Moreover, the crime scene unit’s subsequent recovery of evidence from the motel room did not exceed the scope and duration of the emergency (see People v George, 7 AD3d 810, 811 [2004]; cf. People v Cohen, 87 AD2d 77, 82-83 [1982], affd 58 NY2d 844 [1983], cert denied 461 US 930 [1983]), inasmuch as room 210 was secured while officers waited for the crime scene unit, which arrived within several hours and then seized the ripped currency, ripped sheet, and blood evidence that was in plain view (see People v George, supra; see also People v Brown, 96 NY2d 80, 89 [2001]). While the newspapers from which the police later obtained the defendant’s fingerprints may not have been lawfully seized under the plain-view doctrine because their incriminating nature was not immediately apparent, the information derived from them—that the defendant was the occupant of room 210—was, in fact, subsequently obtained by the police from a variety of independent sources (see People v Good