Houston Cop Who Lied To Justify a No-Knock Drug Raid Says He Is Not Responsible for the Resulting Deaths
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 felony—producing the fraudulent search warrant affidavit—did 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 re
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