A Houston Drug Cop’s Murder Conviction Highlights the Potentially Deadly Consequences of ‘Testilying’
Nearly six years ago, Houston drug cops killed a middle-aged couple, Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, after breaking into their home to serve a search warrant. Last week, a jury convicted Gerald Goines, the former narcotics officer who obtained that no-knock warrant by reporting a heroin purchase that never happened, of felony murder.
Although that outcome was highly unusual, the dishonesty that led to Goines’ prosecution is much more common. When your job involves creating crimes by arranging illegal drug sales, it is not such a big leap to create crimes out of whole cloth, especially if you are convinced your victim is guilty.
Goines targeted Tuttle and Nicholas 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.
In his search warrant affidavit, Goines claimed a confidential informant had bought heroin from a man at 7815 Harding Street, where Tuttle and Nicholas lived. Goines later confessed he had invented that transaction, although he claimed he personally had bought heroin at the house the evening before the raid.
Prosecutors showed that was not true either. They presented evidence that Goines was 20 miles away from the house at the time of the alleged drug purchase and had not visited the location that day.
As jurors learned during the sentencing phase of Goines’ trial, his lethal lies were part of a long pattern. For more than a decade, drug suspects had complained that Goines was framing them, but no one in a position of authority took them seriously until it was too late for Tuttle and Nicholas.
Back in 2008, for instance, Goines claimed he had bought crack cocaine from Otis Mallet. Mallet, who always insisted that Goines was lying, served two years of an eight-year prison sentence before he was released on parole. In 2020, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declared him “actually innocent.”
Mallet’s case was one of 1,400 involving Goines that the Harris County District Attorney’s Office re-examined after the Harding Street raid. More than 30 convictions have been overturned as a result of that review.
The informant who supposedly bought heroin from Tuttle worked with Goine
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