Just inside the front door, two teeth sit in a dried puddle of blood. Embedded in the walls and floor are bullets that were never removed.

In the dining room, a shot-up man’s shirt lies in a heap on the floor, the evidence tag still attached. Blood spatter speckles the walls, sofas and stray boxes. Nearly empty drug baggies clutter the floor.

A four-day independent forensics review at 7815 Harding Street found a cache of evidence left behind by the city’s crime scene teams after a botched drug raid at the home left dead a couple suspected of selling drugs.

Hired by the relatives of Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle, the new forensics team found no signs the pair fired shots at police — and plenty of signs that previous investigators overlooked dozens of pieces of potential evidence in what one expert called a “sloppy” investigation.

“It doesn’t appear that they took the basic steps to confirm and collect the physical evidence to know whether police were telling the truth,” said attorney Mike Doyle, who is representing the Nicholas family. “That’s the whole point of forensic scene documentation. That’s the basic check on people just making stuff up.”

Inconsistencies

According to the Houston Police Department’s account, undercover narcotics officers burst in the front door of the Pecan Park home on Jan. 28 and opened fire as soon as a pit bull lunged at them. Hearing the gunshot, Tuttle came running out from the back of the house and started shooting at the officers with a .357 revolver, striking the case agent who’d been the first man through the door.

The wounded lawman fell on the couch near Nicholas, who allegedly made a move for his weapon. A back-up officer opened fire and killed the 58-year-old.

But the shoot-out continued, and in the end, Tuttle and Nicholas were killed and five officers injured — including four who were shot. Police maintain it was not friendly fire.

Though the botched raid was intended to target heroin dealers, authorities said they only turned up 18 grams of marijuana and 1.5 grams of cocaine — user-level amounts. And the first man through the door, case agent Gerald Goines, later retired under investigation amid accusations that he’d lied on the search warrant used to justify the raid.

Houston police, the FBI and the Harris County District Attorney’s Office launched separate investigations into the matter, and prosecutors are exploring the possibility of criminal charges against one or more of the officers involved.

But now, the four-day review by independent forensic expert Mike Maloney, a retired supervisory special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, is raising additional new questions about the deadly bust.

Though police said they started shooting when the dog lunged as they came through the door, Maloney’s forensics team found that the dog was shot and killed at the edge of the dining room, 15 feet from the front door. Authorities never picked up the shotgun shell when they collected evidence.

And police said that Tuttle started firing at them, but Maloney’s team did not find clear evidence of that.

“The initial bullet trajectories appear to be somewhat contradictory,” said Louisiana-based attorney Chuck Bourque, who is also representing the Nicholas family. “We see no evidence that anybody inside the house was firing toward the door.”

Some of the bullet holes outside the house appeared at least a foot from the door, a fact that Doyle flagged as troubling.

“You can’t see into the house from there,” he said, “you’re firing into the house through a wall.”

The attorneys for the slain couple’s families invited the Texas Rangers and the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences to attend the re-investigation, but both declined.

Houston police spokesman Victor Senties declined to comment on the team’s findings, citing the ongoing investigation. Chief Art Acevedo could not be reached Monday for comment.

Uncollected evidence

For three months after the raid, the home sat abandoned, windows boarded up and flowers in the front yard.

When the Tuttle and Nicholas families finally went inside for the first time in mid-April, what they found was a mess. Bullet holes pierced a timer above the stove, and dog food bags, soda cans and clothes littered the house.

But, it appears, it wasn’t until Maloney and his team went in on Friday that anyone systematically went through everything. Maloney’s investigators tested every dark stain and speckle for blood, both human and animal. They dug bullets out of the walls, and measured the holes left behind. They mapped out trajectories, and searched for shrapnel.

“Our goal is through the bloodstain and bullet trajectory testing to be able to tell where everyone was standing when the shots were fired,” he said.

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They won’t have their final determination on that until more testing comes back, but in the course of their weekend review, Maloney’s team found a trove of uncollected evidence, an apparent oversight the Houston Forensic Science Center president Dr. Peter Stout chalked up to the mayhem of an active scene.

“Crime scenes are often chaotic,” he said Monday, stressing that his teams took hundreds of photos and collected hours of video during multiple visits to the home. “There is always the risk that some evidence will not be found or that items that seem unimportant today become significant tomorrow.”

Among that evidence was nearly a dozen .223- and .45-caliber bullets Maloney and Doyle believe came from police guns. Typically, Tuttle kept four of the guns he owned locked up in a bedroom safe as family heirlooms, Doyle said.

He usually kept a loaded .357 Magnum by his bedside. That was the weapon police initially said he fired in the shoot-out, though it’s not clear what happened to the gun afterward. It was not cataloged in the only search warrant return that has been publicly released.

Asking questions

Maloney’s team found no indication that any of the guns Tuttle owned were fired toward the front of the house at incoming police. The Houston Police Department has not released the results of any ballistics testing and has not specified which guns were fired in the exchange.

In the puddle where Tuttle died after he was shot at least eight times, Maloney found what appear to be two human teeth. An autopsy report showed he’d been shot in the jaw.

Tossed aside in a pile of clothes in the dining room, Maloney and his team found a man’s shirt with bullet holes and official evidence markers. It wasn’t bloody, so there’s no reason to believe Tuttle was wearing it at the time. But, for reasons that are unclear, authorities tagged it as evidence and left it behind at the scene.

Also left at the scene were powder-coated straws and about a dozen tiny plastic baggies with white residue inside, underneath debris by the living room sofa. Most were of the size that could be used to hold a gram of cocaine, a user-level amount.

Though the Houston Forensic Science Center — the organization primarily responsible for processing scenes like the Harding Street home — removed evidence and took dozens of photographs of the house, experts and the slain couple’s attorneys both were baffled by the amount of material left behind.

“I can’t explain why all that was left — that sounds like something only the Houston Police Department and investigators can answer,” said former Houston Police Chief Charles A. McClelland. “If that evidence is connected to that shooting scene, I’d certainly be asking questions.”

Sam Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, called it “sloppy” and said the uncollected evidence raises other questions.

“How many people have been convicted over the years as a result of sloppy investigations which failed to collect evidence that was there that would have exonerated the suspect?” he said. “If they do it in this kind of a homicide case, what do they do in other kinds of investigations?”

keri.blakinger@chron.com

st.john.smith@chron.com