In January 2019, Gerald Goines, a former Houston narcotics agent who instigated a narcotics bust that resulted in the death of a middle-aged couple falsely accused of heroin trafficking, was shot in the face and killed after he and co-workers broke into the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rogena Nicholas. When investigators interviewed Goines at the hospital after the operation, he was unable to speak because his jaw was wired. Prosecutors said at Goines’ murder trial this week that he had written down his answers.
Sergeant Richard Bass asked Goins for the name of the confidential informant. Search Warrant Affidavit According to documents Goins filed on the day of the investigation, he had bought heroin the previous evening from a middle-aged white man at 7815 Harding St. “There was no confidential informant,” Goins said. WrittenThere was a clear problem with the “self-purchased” supporting story. At the time of the alleged heroin purchase, Bass said Goins had been eating dinner at the Taste of Texas restaurant more than 20 miles away, jurors heard.
Prosecutors showed jurors photos of Goins at the restaurant, and “investigators also found a receipt from HPD.” [Houston Police Department] “Goins was seen on camera exiting the restaurant in a vehicle at the time,” Houston ABC affiliate KTRK reported. Reports“Investigators also found surveillance footage from a neighbor that showed Goins had never been to Harding Street the day before the attack.”
That evidence may seem unnecessary, since defense attorney Nicole DeBord admitted in her opening statement that Goins lied in her affidavit and at the hospital. But the quick revelation of Goins’ testimony suggests that the “pattern of deception” that local prosecutors found when they began reinvestigating the drug case could have been spotted sooner if someone had been paying attention.
Since the Harding Street attack, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Flipped At least 22 convictions were based on Goins’ patently unreliable testimony. Those cases, like this one, featured fictitious drug buys that Goins used to obtain search warrants and sometimes cited the same confidential informants. For years, drug defendants complained that Goins was trying to frame them, but no one took them seriously.
Goins’ fraudulent practices were not limited to fictitious transactions; his search warrant applications frequently listed firearms that were never found. Over a 12-year period, Houston Chronicle ReportedGoins obtained nearly 100 no-knock warrants, and in most cases, informants claimed to have seen firearms in the homes being searched, but only once reported recovering a firearm — a suspicious pattern that no one noticed.
When Goins applied for a no-knock warrant to search Tuttle and Nicholas’s home, he similarly described a nonexistent gun. He said that an informant had seen a 9mm semi-automatic handgun at 7815 Harding Street, but there was no such weapon in the home. Goins cited the fictitious gun to bolster his argument that he would enter the home “without first knocking and announcing the presence and purpose of officers executing the warrant.” He stated that “such knocking and announcing would be dangerous” because “weapons have been sighted during narcotics searches.”
Retired Municipal Judge Gordon G. Markham II, who approved the warrant, testified He wouldn’t have done it if he’d known Goins was lying about buying heroin, but that’s no relief.
Markham noted that it’s unusual for an officer to seek such a warrant in city court rather than district court. He said he approved the warrant about 20 minutes later — not enough time to carefully review the affidavit, much less investigate its basis. Markham overlooked some obvious red flags.
Goins claimed he had been investigating drug activity at Tuttle and Nicholas’ home for two weeks, but did not investigate who lived there, describing the suspect as a “white male, name unknown” who was a heroin dealer.
Goines at the hospital after the attack said: “I was trying to buy from a woman. I bought from a man. I had information about the occupants of the residence. I don’t know if the man I bought from is the man listed in the information.”
The “tip” came from a neighbor, Patricia Garcia, who called 911 to report that her daughter was using heroin at 7815 Harding Street. She claimed that Tuttle and Nicholas were armed and dangerous drug dealers. However, police ultimately discovered that Garcia was I didn’t even have a daughter.She had made the whole thing up. In March 2021, she Pleaded guilty She was subsequently indicted on federal charges based on fraudulent 911 calls. Sentenced Up to 40 months imprisonment.
Officers Richard Morales and Nicole Blankenship Reeves investigated Garcia’s report, and Blankenship Reeves “conducted a visit to the residence and found no indications of criminal activity.” Houston Chronicle ReportsLt. Marcia Todd, who was in a relationship with Blankenship Reeves, nevertheless urged her to “write down the information about the house and give it to her.” Based on unconfirmed information that later turned out to be nothing more than a lie from a neighbor with a grudge against Nicholas, Todd left a “handwritten note” for Goins, who was to investigate the matter further.
Goins clearly did not, and the fact that he did not even know the name of the “white male” who allegedly sold heroin to the confidential informant was a clear clue to Markham that the warrant’s basis was uncertain. Another clue is that in the affidavit, Goins states that he “advised” the informant that “drugs were being sold and stored” at the home, but gives no evidence of this. Markham, who spent only 20 minutes reading the affidavit and endorsing the warrant, does not appear to be willing to evaluate the thoroughness of Goins’ investigation.
Goins’ fellow officers did not believe he knew anything about the occupants of the house he was about to enter. He explained to the tactical team that there were no dogs in the target home. Chronicle Reports“He testified that he told Mr. Goins that that was not true,” Morales said. “Mr. Tuttle and Mr. Nicholas owned a dog that another officer had seen in the front yard a few weeks earlier.”
In fact, the couple had two dogs, and an officer killed one with a shotgun shortly after Goins and his coworkers entered the home. This detail was crucial, because the officer’s first shot sparked a shootout that killed the homeowner and wounded Goins and three other officers.
According to prosecutors, Tuttle was taking a nap in his bedroom when officers broke down his door and killed his dog. “Mr. Tuttle heard gunshots ringing out inside his home, his door being blown open, his wife lying on the couch and his dog dead in the living room and he reacted as any normal person would,” said Harris County Assistant District Attorney Keaton Volcht. said “He grabbed a handgun and came out angry,” a juror testified Monday.
In contrast, Houston’s then-Police Chief Art Acevedo placed full blame for the violence on Tuttle and Nicholas. Acevedo called the pair dangerous criminals and said they ran a notorious local “drug house” where police “actually bought black tar heroin.” Acevedo praised the officers, especially Goines, as “heroes,” and claimed the neighborhood was grateful for the officers’ brave intervention.
Evidence of Goins’ deception eventually forced Acevedo to amend his testimony, but he continued to call the other officers “heroes” and even claimed they “had probable cause to be there” — assertions that are in stark contradiction to the state’s evidence against Goins and the federal indictment charging him with fatal violations of the Fourth Amendment.
The cops apparently do not have Goins had “probable cause to be there,” a fact that would have been obvious had Markham questioned Goins thoroughly. But if the raid hadn’t gone horribly wrong, most people would have continued to believe the story Acevedo originally told. If Goins hadn’t been shot during the police raid on Tuttle and Nicholas’s home, he would have been able to fabricate evidence to support his false claims and would have been free to continue framing people he thought were guilty.
Goins had been a Houston police officer for more than 30 years when he resigned in disgrace after the Harding Street raid, but despite allegations of perjury and a history of making claims that could not be independently verified, no one in a position of power doubted his integrity until it was too late.
