Former Houston Drug Cop Gets 60 Years for His Deadly Lies
Gerald Goines, the mendacious former Houston narcotics officer who had a habit of framing drug suspects, received two concurrent 60-year prison sentences on Tuesday for causing the deaths of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, who were killed during a 2019 raid that Goines instigated by falsely accusing them of selling heroin. Since Goines is 60 years old and won’t be eligible for parole until he serves half of his prison term, the penalty probably amounts to a life sentence.
“This is historic because we believe this is the first-ever murder conviction of a Houston-area law enforcement officer [for a crime] committed while in uniform,” said Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. The reason such verdicts have been so hard to obtain, she explained, is that “people want to believe in the police—that’s who we’re trained to trust from the time we’re little.”
In this case, that trust was sorely misplaced. Goines targeted Tuttle and Nicholas, a middle-aged couple who had lived at 7815 Harding Street for two decades, based on 911 calls from a neighbor, Patricia Garcia, who described them as armed and dangerous drug dealers who had sold her daughter heroin. Garcia, who did not even have a daughter, later admitted she had made the whole thing up, pleading guilty to federal charges related to her false reports.
After an officer visited the Harding Street house and saw no evidence of criminal activity, a supervisor asked Goines, a 34-year veteran assigned to Squad 15 of the Houston Police Department’s Narcotics Division, to investigate Garcia’s tip. Two weeks later, after an investigation that was cursory if not nonexistent, Goines obtained a no-knock search warrant, claiming a confidential informant had bought heroin at the house from “a white male, whose name is unknown.” Goines reported that the informant had seen “a large quantity of baggies” containing heroin, along with “a semi-auto hand gun of a 9mm caliber”—a claim he used to bolster the justification for allowing him and his colleagues to enter the home without knocking and announcing themselves.
Police ultimately found personal-use quantities of marijuana and cocaine at the house. But there was no heroin, no other evidence of drug dealing, and no 9mm pistol. Goines later confessed he had invented the heroin purchase.
That information came to light only after the cops broke into Tuttle and Nicholas’ home and immediately shot the couple’s dog. Tuttle, who according to prosecutors was napping in a bedroom at the time of the raid, responded to the tumult and gunfire by grabbing a pistol and shooting at the intruders, injuring four of them—including Goines, who was shot in the face. The officers responded with a hail of at least 40 bullets, killing Tuttle and Nicholas, who was unarmed but allegedly looked like she was about to grab a gun from an injured officer.
During Goines’ trial, prosecutors persuaded jurors that he was responsible for those deaths because he had lied to obtain the search warrant. Two weeks ago, they convicted him of murder under 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.” The underlying felony was tampering with government records, a crime that Goines committed by lying in his search warrant affidavit.
During the trial, Goines’ longtime confidential informant testified that he paid her to sign forms documenting fictional drug purchases. He also wanted her to help justify no-knock raids by saying she had seen guns in homes she never visited. 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.
The disastrous Harding Street raid prompted Ogg’s office to reexamine drug cases that were based on Goines’ plainly unreliable word. They discovered what Ogg described as “a pattern of deceit” going back more than a decade. More than 30 convictions have been overturned as a result of that review.
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