This week, nearly six years after Houston cops killed a middle-aged couple falsely accused of selling heroin, a jury began considering the murder case against Gerald Goines, the former narcotics officer who instigated the deadly raid. His lawyers concede that he fabricated the basis for the no-knock warrant that authorized him and his colleagues to break into the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas on January 28, 2019. But they argue that he is not responsible for their deaths and therefore should not have been charged with murder.
Goines, a 34-year veteran who retired after the raid, also faces a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony punishable by two to 10 years in prison. That charge is based on a search warrant affidavit in which Goines claimed a confidential informant had purchased heroin from a middle-aged “white male, whose name is unknown,” at 7815 Harding Street, where Tuttle and Nicholas lived. The informant supposedly saw a 9mm semi-automatic pistol and a “large quantity of plastic baggies” containing heroin at the house.
As Goines later admitted, none of that was true. Goines, who was shot in the neck during the Harding Street raid, was taken to a hospital, where he confessed that he had invented the “controlled buy” he described in his affidavit. But he claimed that he personally had bought heroin from Tuttle.
That was not true either, defense attorney Nicole DeBorde admitted during her opening statement at Goines’ trial on Monday. “While it’s true you’re not going to be happy with Gerald Goines for some of the things that he said that were not true in that affidavit, and later in that hospital, he didn’t murder anybody,” she told the jurors. “He is not legally responsible for murder. This is a case of the wrong charges being filed. There are other consequences for him.”
The two murder charges are based on a statute that applies when someone “commits or attempts to commit a felony” and “in the course of and in furtherance of the commission or attempt…commits or attempts to commit an act clearly dangerous to human life that causes the death of an individual.” That charge is inappropriate in this case, DeBorde argued, because Goines’ underlying felonyproducing the fraudulent search warrant affidavitdid not cause the deaths of Tuttle and Nicholas.
In DeBorde’s telling, that outcome resulted from the couple’s decision to resist the invading police officers instead of surrendering. According to DeBorde, Tuttle and Nicholas both knew the men who broke down their door and immediately killed their dog with a shotgun were police officers. She said Tuttle nevertheless grabbed a revolver and came out shooting, injuring Goines and three other officers, while Nicholas tried to grab a gun from one of them. “Nicholas’ choices to not respond to instructions by police and to try and grab the gun of a fallen officer is the cause of her death,” DeBorde said.
According to this account, Tuttle and Nicholas got what they deserved. Prosecutors told a different story.
When the cops charged into the house around 5 p.m., Harris County Assistant District Attorney Keaton Forcht said, Nicholas, a 58-year-old cancer patient, was sitting on a couch watching TV while Tuttle, a disabled 59-year-old Navy veteran, was asleep in a bedroom. According to the prosecution, Tuttle responded to the tumult with gunfire because he thought he was defending his home against violent criminals.
“Evidence will show Gerald Goines was legally responsible for every shot in that house, whether it was from officers or Dennis Tuttle,” Forcht said. “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. He grabs his pistol and comes storming out.”
Although the officers were not wearing uniforms, Goines’ lawyers argued that the word police on their tactical gear would have made it clear who they were. The defense also claimed the cops verbally identified themselves as police officers. But no such announcement can be heard in the available audio record, which includes a neighbor’s cellphone recording and video from a body camera worn by Officer Richard Morales, who arrived just before the cops entered the house.
Morales testified that he did not hear the officers announce themselves. But defense attorney Mac Secrest pointed out that Morales had told internal investigators he heard someone shout “police” as the door was breached. According to the account that Art Acevedo, then Houston’s police chief, gave at a press conference the night of the raid, the cops “announced themselves as Houston police officers while simultaneously breaching the front door.”
Like Goines’ lawyers, Acevedo put the blame for the ensuing 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.” He hailed the copsGoines especiallyas “heroes” and claimed that neighbors were grateful to the officers for their brave intervention.
“Immediately upon breaching the door,” Acevedo said, “the officers came under fire.” But as he revealed during apress conference the next day, it was actually the police who fired first, killing what he described as “a very large pit bull,” whose body can be seen near the front door in photographs of the scene.
According to the story that Acevedo told, shouting “police” while “simultaneously breaching the front door” gave Nicholas and Tuttle ample notice that the men who had just broken into their home and killed their pet were officers of the law. Goines’ attorneys are telling the same improbable story in arguing that Nicholas and Tuttle caused their own deaths.
After Goines’ deceit was revealed, Acevedo stopped calling him a hero. But he continued to describe the other officers that way and even insisted they “had probable cause to be there,” which plainly was not true.
Nor was it true that Tuttle and Nicholas were known locally as drug dealers, as Acevedo initially claimed. While police found personal-use quantities of marijuana and cocaine at the house, they did not discover any evidence of the drug dealing that Goines had described. The investigation that he supposedly conducted prior to the raid was prompted by false reports from a neighbor, Patricia Garcia, who had a grudge against Nicholas. “She was always fighting with Rhogena, always jealous of Rhogena,” another neighbor, Sarah Sanchez, testified on Monday. “She was very hateful.”
As Houston Public Media notes, Garcia “told police that her daughter was doing heroin inside the couple’s home and that the couple were drug dealers and had guns inside their home.” But “investigators eventually found that Garcia had no daughter and that her other claims were also false.” In March 2021, Garcia pleaded guilty to federal charges based on her fraudulent 911 calls. Three months later, she was sentenced to 40 months in prison and three years of probation.
The raid that killed Nicholas and Tuttle was “based on lie after lie after lie,” Forcht noted on Monday. “But for the actions of Gerald Goines,” he said, “those two homeowners would still be alive.” In disputing that causal link, Goines’ lawyers are relying on a narrative that depicts his victims as the real aggressors.
If the jury accepts that narrative, what “other consequences” might Goines face? DeBorde essentially conceded that he is guilty of document tampering, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison. But that is not the only possibility.
Goines also faces federal charges in connection with the Harding Street raid. “While acting under color of law,” according to a November 2019 indictment, Goines “prepared an affidavit for a search warrant that contained numerous material false statements, presented that affidavit to a State of Texas judicial officer, swore under oath to the truthfulness of the contents of that affidavit, obtained a search warrant based on that affidavit from that judicial officer,” and “executed that search warrant.
In doing so, the indictment says, Goines “willfully depriv[ed] Dennis Tuttle of the right, secured and protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States, for people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.” That offense “involved the use, attempted use and threatened use of a dangerous weapon” and “resulted in the death of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas.” If prosecutors can prove that last allegation, which is also the central point of contention in Goines’ state trial, he could face a life sentence, which is also true in the state case.
The federal indictment also accused Steven Bryant, a former Houston narcotics officer who backed up Goines’ phony story of a heroin purchase that never happened, of falsifying records “with intent to impede, obstruct, and influence the investigation and proper administration of [a] matter within federal jurisdiction.” Bryant pleaded guilty to that charge in June 2021.
In addition to the criminal charges, Goines faces federal civil rights lawsuits filed by relatives of Tuttle and Nicholas. One of those lawsuits also names Acevedo as a defendant.
The Goines scandal prompted Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg’s office to review thousands of drug cases. Those investigations revealed a “pattern of deceit” going back years. “The Texas Court of Criminal Appealshas overturned at least 22 convictions linked to Goines,” the Associated Press reports.
Acevedo has insisted that the Harding Street raid did not reflect “a systemic problem with the Houston Police Department.” But Ogg saw things differently. “Houston Police narcotics officers falsified documentation about drug payments to confidential informants with the support of supervisors,” she said in July 2020. “Goines and others could never have preyed on our community the way they did without the participation of their supervisors; every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was circumvented.”
