Houston Officials Trusted a Dishonest Drug Cop for Decades Before His Lies Killed 2 People

Gerald Goines, the former Houston narcotics officer who instigated a January 2019 drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple he falsely accused of selling heroin, was shot in the face after he and his colleagues broke into the house where Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas lived and died. When an internal investigator interviewed him at the hospital after the raid, Goines could not speak because his jaw was wired shut. Instead, prosecutors explained during Goines’ murder trial this week, he wrote down his answers.

Sgt. Richard Bass asked Goines the name of the confidential informant who, according to the search warrant affidavit that Goines filed the day of the raid, had bought heroin from a middle-aged white man at 7815 Harding Street the evening before. “There was no confidential informant,” Goines wrote. “I made the purchase by myself.” There was an obvious problem with that backup explanation: At the time of the purported heroin purchase, Bass told the jury, Goines was eating dinner at Taste of Texas, a restaurant more than 20 miles away.

Prosecutors showed jurors a picture of Goines at the restaurant. “Investigators also found a receipt in an HPD [Houston Police Department] vehicle from the restaurant at the time Goines was seen on camera,” KTRK, the ABC affiliate in Houston, reports. “They also found surveillance video from a neighbor showing Goines never went to Harding Street the day before the raid.”

Since defense attorney Nicole DeBorde conceded during her opening statement that Goines lied in his affidavit and at the hospital, this evidence might seem unnecessary. But the quick unraveling of Goines’ story suggests the “pattern of deceit” that local prosecutors discovered when they started reexamining his drug cases could have been detected much sooner if anyone had been paying attention.

Since the Harding Street raid, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has overturned at least 22 convictions that were based on Goines’ plainly unreliable word. Those cases, like this one, featured imaginary drug purchases that Goines used to obtain search warrants, sometimes citing the same confidential informant. For years, drug defendants had complained that Goines was framing them, but no one took them seriously.

Goines’ dishonesty went beyond fictional transactions. His search warrant applications frequently described guns that were never found. Over 12 years, The Houston Chronicle reported, Goines obtained nearly 100 no-knock warrants, almost always claiming that informants had seen firearms in the homes he wanted to search. But he reported recovering guns only once—a suspicious pattern that no one seems to have noticed.

When Goines applied for a no-knock warrant to search Tuttle and Nicholas’ home, he likewise described a nonexistent gun. He said his informant had seen a 9mm semi-automatic pistol at 7815 Harding Street, but there was no such weapon at the house. Goines cited that imaginary gun to bolster his argument for entering the home “without first knocking and announcing the presence and purpose of officers executing the warrant.” Since “a weapon was observed during the narcotic investigation,” he said, “such knocking and announcing would be dangerous.”

Former municipal judge Gordon G. Marcum II, who approved the warrant, testified that he would not have done so if he had known Goines was lying about the heroin purchase. But that is not exactly reassuring.

Marcum noted that it was unusual for an officer to seek such a warrant from a municipal judge rather than a district court. He said he approved the warrant after about 20 minutes. That is not much time to carefully review an affidavit, let alone probe its basis, and Marcum overlooked some obvious red flags.

Although Goines claimed he had been investigating drug activity at Tuttle and Nicholas’ home for two weeks, he had not bothered to find out who lived there. He described the alleged heroin dealer as “a white male, whose name is unknown.”

At the hospital after the raid, Goines said: “I was looking to buy from a female. I bought from the male. I had info regarding people at the residence. I’m not sure if the guy I bought from was male listed in info.”

That “info” came from a neighbor, Patricia Garcia, who called 911 to report that her daughter was using heroin at 7815 Harding Street. She alleged that Tuttle and Nicholas were armed and dangerous drug dealers. But police eventually discovered that Garcia, who did not even have a daughter, had made the whole thing up. In March 2021, she pleaded guilty to federal charges based on her fraudulent 911 calls, and she was later sentenced to 40 months in prison.

Officers Richard Morales and Nicole Blankenship-Reeves were charged with following up on Garcia’s tip. Blankenship-Reeves “visited the home and found no sign of criminal activity,” The Houston Chronicle reports. Lt. Marsha Todd, who was dating Blankenship-Reeves, nevertheless urged her girlfriend to “write down her intel about the house and pass it to her.” Based on an unverified tip that would prove to be nothing but the lies of a neighbor with a grudge against Nicholas, Todd left a “handwritten memo” for Goines, who was supposed to investigate the matter further.

It seems clear that Goines did not do that, and the fact that he did not even know the name of the “white male” who had supposedly sold heroin to a confidential informant was an obvious clue for Marcum that the basis for the warrant was shaky. Another clue: In his affidavit, Goines said he had “advised” his informant that “narcotics were being sold and stored” at the house, but he cited no evidence of that. It does not look like Marcum, who by his account devoted all of 20 minutes to reading the affidavit and approving the warrant, tried to assess the thoroughness of Goines’ purported investigation.

Goines’ fellow officers also had reason to doubt that he knew much of anything about the people whose home they were about to invade. Although he “briefed a tactical team that the targets’ home did not have a dog,” the Chronicle reports, Morales “testified that he told Goines that was not true.” Morales said Tuttle and Nicholas “had a dog that another officer had seen in the front yard weeks earlier.”

The couple actually had two dogs, one of which an officer killed with a shotgun immediately after Goines and his colleagues broke into the house. That detail proved to be crucial, since the cops’ opening shot helped precipitate an exchange of gunfire that killed the homeowners while injuring Goines and three other officers.

According to prosecutors, Tuttle was napping in a bedroom when the cops broke down the door and killed his dog. “Mr. Tuttle reacted as anybody would, any normal person, hearing guns ring out in their house, their doors blown in, his wife on the couch, the dog is dead in the living room,” Harris County Assistant District Attorney Keaton Forcht told the jury on Monday. “He grabs his pistol and comes storming out.”

By contrast, Art Acevedo, then Houston’s police chief, put the blame for the violence squarely on Tuttle and Nicholas, whom he described as dangerous criminals who were operating a locally notorious “drug house” where police had “actually bought black-tar heroin.” Acevedo hailed the cops—Goines especially—as “heroes” and claimed that neighbors were grateful to the officers for their brave intervention.

The evidence of Goines’ deceit eventually forced Acevedo to revise that account. But he continued to describe the other officers as “heroes” and even insisted they “had probable cause to be there.” That claim is blatantly inconsistent with the state’s evidence against Goines and the federal indictment that charges him with deadly Fourth Amendment violations.

The cops plainly did not have “probable cause to be there,” and that fact should have been apparent to Marcum if he had thoroughly questioned Goines. Yet if the raid had not gone horribly wrong, most people would have continued to believe the story that Acevedo initially told. If Goines had not been shot during the police assault on Tuttle and Nicholas’s home, he could have planted evidence to validate his false claims, and he would have been free to continue framing people he thought were guilty.

When he resigned in disgrace after the Harding Street raid, Goines had been a Houston police officer for more than three decades. But despite allegations of perjury and a history of making claims that could not be independently verified, no one in a position of authority questioned his honesty until it was too late.

The post Houston Officials Trusted a Dishonest Drug Cop for Decades Before His Lies Killed 2 People appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2024/09/13/houston-officials-trusted-a-dishonest-drug-cop-for-decades-before-his-lies-killed-2-people/