Houston botched drug raid was not the first A wider picture of misconduct among narcotics officers emerges after deadly HPD case

Houston botched drug raid was not the first A wider picture of misconduct among narcotics officers emerges after deadly HPD case

Published Nov. 21, 2019

When Michelle Brooks arrived at her home on Tuam Street, her door was hanging off its hinges, her furniture lay in shambles. Houston Police officer Gerald Goines and his squad arrived that day in May 2014 looking for a drug dealer named Roy Lee Williams.

But Goines didn’t find the marijuana they said Williams was dealing. Nor did they find him. Williams lived next door. Instead, Goines detained Brooks’ husband, Sherman, for hours before releasing him without charges. It was a fruitless raid for Goines and his squad. Six months later, police returned and arrested Williams — at the apartment next door.

Earlier this year, Goines raided another home halfway across the city. But the raid by Squad 15 on 7815 Harding Street in January ended much differently.

Goines’ squad was one of two units tasked with low-level drug enforcement in south Houston. Squad 15 broke down the door of the small home on Harding during a supposed heroin bust, but gunfire and chaos erupted instead. Homeowners Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle were killed and five officers injured. Police found small amounts of cocaine and marijuana but no heroin.

In an affidavit Goines used to obtain a search warrant for the Harding raid, he allegedly lied about using a confidential informant to buy drugs, bringing the Houston Police Department’s narcotics division under intense scrutiny in one of the worst scandals to hit HPD in decades. Goines was later charged with felony murder. His partner, Steven Bryant, was charged with tampering with a government record. The officers have since retired.

LATEST: FBI arrest 2 police officers, 911 caller linked to deadly Harding Street drug raid

On Wednesday, federal authorities announced additional charges against the two officers, stemming from a civil rights investigation into the incident. Goines faces seven federal charges, including two for civil rights violations, two charges he destroyed or falsified records, and three charges of tampering with a witness, victim, or confidential informant.

HPD Chief Art Acevedo maintains the problems with the operation and deaths of Tuttle and Nicholas were the work of a pair of rogue officers.

“I don’t have any indication it’s a pattern and practice,” Acevedo said after the raid.

However, a Houston Chronicle review of police records reveals a fuller picture of misconduct by Goines and past problems in the narcotics division.

Officers filed false affidavits when they asked judges for search warrants or arrest warrants. They performed sloppy investigative work and misrepresented their use of confidential informants, according to disciplinary records and court documents.

The Chronicle’s review also raises questions about the oversight of the division. While experts say best practices call for officers to rotate out of units such as narcotics regularly, dozens of officers have spent 10 years or more in that division at HPD. HPD’s inspections division audited narcotics’ operations just once in the 20 years prior to the deadly Jan. 28 raid, according to information obtained through a public records request.

Acevedo declined to discuss specific allegations against Goines and Bryant or the department’s internal investigation of the narcotics division, citing their pending criminal cases. Lawyers for the two men describe them as two hardworking officers. Goines and Bryant maintain their innocence.

‘Supposed to protect and serve’

Barbara Ann Thomas had just lain down late one afternoon in May 2014 when she heard someone banging on her door, prying it off its lock. Moments later, Houston police narcotics officers rushed into her northeast Houston apartment on Hirsch Road, guns drawn, pushing her and her 37-year-old son, John, onto a couch.

Don’t move, they yelled. She heard officers searching the apartment, she said. She heard picture frames falling off walls and said officers rifled through her possessions, looking for drugs.

“I have never cried so hard in my life,” she said. “I thought I was dead.”

They were looking for a crack dealer who went by “Nash,” or “Little Black,” according to lead officer Jimmy J. Williams’ affidavit and court records. In court records, Williams said he’d used a confidential informant to buy a small amount of crack cocaine from the dealer.

RELATED: Court documents reveal origins of botched narcotics raid on Harding Street.

There weren’t any drugs at Thomas’ home, however. The squad had hit the wrong apartment.

Williams swore in court records he’d seen the informant purchase drugs from Thomas’ home. Later, however, he acknowledged to HPD supervisors that he didn’t actually observe the drug transaction, just watched his informant walk toward the building housing Thomas’ apartment.

Williams, who is white, said he didn’t want to raise suspicions walking through the apartment complex — whose occupants are mostly black — to verify the unit where his informant said he’d bought drugs. When he applied for a search warrant, he’d listed the address as 5818 Hirsch — but Thomas lived at 5816 Hirsch.

Police records show that after the raid Williams said he did not execute the warrant “after a discrepancy in the address was observed.” In a subsequent report, he wrote that Thomas invited him into the apartment to talk further. Thomas disputes that claim and said Williams and other officers spent longer in the apartment than the five to 10 minutes he wrote in his reports.

Williams received a one-day suspension because he didn’t confirm the address supplied by his informant and didn’t document the squad’s damage to Thomas’ home.

William Demond, Thomas’ attorney, asked the city to fix her door — which he said cost more than $600 to replace. He said he never received a response.

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Thomas later sued Williams. The case went to the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where the court ruled last year that Williams couldn’t be sued because he had been acting as an employee of the city of Houston and was protected from litigation because he believed he was executing the warrant at the correct address.

Five years after the raid on her apartment, Thomas’ anger has yet to abate.

“You’re supposed to protect and serve,” Thomas said. “You’re not supposed to hurt me, verbally abuse me, physically abuse me. What gives you that right?

In a phone interview, Williams described the incident as one of the “lowest moments” of his career.

“Everything I did, I relied on the informant’s information,” he said. “That was a common practice back then.”

“They gave me an address I wasn’t able to verify, but they were 100 percent certain that’s what it was, but it ended up being wrong,” he said. “We’re human. We make mistakes, but we don’t want to repeat those mistakes.”

‘It sticks in your mind’

HPD’s street drug cops launched other questionable raids across the city.

In June 2018, Goines and other narcotics officers broke down Lowell Goffney’s front door at 3441 Rosalie, a Third Ward home across the street from Christian Home Missionary Baptist Church.

The 66-year-old man was sitting in his living room when police rushed in with their rifles raised, targeted lasers across his chest and demanded he “shut up” and not move.

Goffney, who hadn’t had any run-ins with the law in more than a decade, prayed he wouldn’t be shot.

“I’m sitting right here,” he said, gesturing to the chair in the middle of his small living room. “So I shut up.”

Police released Goffney — who was never identified as a suspect in HPD’s warrant — when officers couldn’t find drugs in his apartment. He was never charged with a crime.

Instead, Goines and his squad arrested Jonathan Alvis. Alvis was sitting in a gray Hyundai in the church parking lot adjacent to Goffney’s home. Court records show Goines said he found a rock of crack cocaine — .8 grams — sitting in a baggie in “plain view” on the back seat. Alvis pleaded guilty, receiving a three-year deferred adjudication probation.

Goffney is still angry about how he was treated.

“It sticks in your mind,” he said. “I will never forget that as long as I live.”

Sloppiness and few consequences

HPD, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office and the FBI all launched investigations into the Harding Street raid.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in an interview that investigators are comparing sworn affidavits and other government records filed by Squad 15 officers with additional evidence, including witnesses who claim serious wrongdoing, in a review that has grown to include some 14,000 cases.

“We know that two people were murdered on Harding Street, and we are going to get to the truth about why and how they were killed,” she said in a statement to the Chronicle. “That puts Squad 15, as well as HPD’s narcotics division’s past practices, under a prosecutorial microscope.”

The allegations of untruthfulness against Goines aren’t the first time HPD’s narcotics officers have been accused of lying over the past two decades.

The narcotics division is tasked with combating drug trafficking across the city, frequently taking on dangerous criminals in high-tension drug busts. Records show the division comprises about 180 officers spread across 20 squads, ranging from street level enforcement to units handling money laundering, major drug cartels and inter-agency squads tracking higher-level drug trafficking.

A Chronicle review of more than two decades of police records and court documents found at least eight officers accused of misrepresenting casework. In at least nine other instances, officers were disciplined for miscounting money and losing or mishandling evidence.

HPD supervisors suspended Carl Gaines in 1997 for 10 days for filing false police reports in six incidents. Internal investigators discovered Gaines had fabricated events and statements in drug cases developed through a confidential informant who he paid to buy drugs. A grand jury declined to indict the officer. Gaines retired in 2014. Reached by phone, he declined to comment.

RELATED: Forensic review raises more questions about Houston Police’s Harding Street drug raid

The year Gaines was disciplined for making false statements, then-Chief Clarence Bradford reprimanded Nicholas Wilson for violating policy by giving an informant his own money to buy crack cocaine. The chief faulted Wilson for distorting how he used the informant, not keeping notes on the buy, and failing to document chain of custody of the money.

Police officers lying or filing misleading warrants is particularly troubling, said former Judge Elsa Alcala, because there are not as many checks or balances when police seek to take such actions as other parts of the criminal justice system.

Alcala, who served on the state’s top criminal appeals court from 2011-2018, said officers who misrepresent facts to get search warrants or make arrests are engaging in serious misconduct.

“It begs the question — was it the first time that happened?” Alcala said. “It would be highly improbable it’s the first time, and then the question becomes ‘how far back does it go?’ and ‘who else knew about it?’”

In 2008, a federal judge overseeing a defendant’s appeal of his drug conviction accused HPD officer Christopher Cayton of copying and pasting language from a months-old search warrant into another for a Third Ward home.

U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison declined to dismiss the case — citing evidence and testimony from other officers — but called Cayton’s behavior offensive, court records show.

“Cayton’s statement that he just happened to misspell the word ‘unknown’ in both affidavits in exactly the same location and his other testimony regarding the similarity of both affidavits is simply not credible,” Ellison wrote.

Cayton’s disciplinary file makes no mention of the incident. Reached by phone, he declined to comment.

RELATED: After drug raid scandal, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo creates new narcotics squad to handle high-risk warrants

The same year Cayton drew Ellison’s ire, then-HPD Chief Harold Hurtt fired Cynthia Marino after investigators discovered the rookie narcotics officer made numerous false statements to superiors and in official documents about a drug buy she conducted to make a case against a suspect.

Marino attempted to justify her actions by saying she was trying to “look productive as far as paperwork was concerned,” discipline records show.

A grand jury reviewed the case but declined to bring perjury charges. An arbitrator eventually overruled Marino’s termination, and she was allowed back on the force after a 210-day unpaid suspension. She remains at HPD, assigned to the office of technology services. Marino did not respond to a phone call seeking comment.

Two years later, then-HPD Chief Charles A. McClelland suspended Carlos Lerma for 15 days after the internal affairs department discovered he lied about meetings with confidential informants. He reported he went with another narcotics officer to make drug buys, but he was actually alone. According to Lerma’s disciplinary paperwork, his actions were due to his squad being “already under fire for being the lowest in productivity and in arrests, and I did not want to bring any more attention to our squad or to myself.”

A grand jury later declined to indict Lerma. He now works in HPD’s property room. Lerma declined to comment.

Supervisors also reprimanded Lerma’s boss, Tien Nguyen, for signing off on Lerma’s work without reviewing it.

In 2016, narcotics officer Marco Santuario said in court he’d acted as a confidential source to another officer after a defense attorney discovered he billed HPD $525 for the information three years before. Santuario said he used the money to pay a confidential informant who had not been involved in the case or participated in the investigation.

“I’ve never had anything like this happen in my court or in my career of 30 years in the criminal justice system,” Judge Mark Kent Ellis said, according to court transcripts. “This is a new one, and it is a disturbing one.”

Prosecutors dropped the case, “in the interest of justice,” court records show.

Santuario did not respond to phone calls and an email seeking comment.

A wider history of problems

In the months after the botched raid on Harding Street, the Chronicle scoured dozens of Goines’ warrants — along with those executed by the rest of his squad — and reviewed past arrests. The Chronicle found the vast majority of Goines’ warrants — and those of his fellow squad members — were no-knock raids, operations that Acevedo has since barred narcotics officers from performing in most cases.

To obtain a no-knock warrant, Goines had to convince a magistrate or judge that the target house was dangerous or that drug evidence could be quickly destroyed if officers weren’t able to enter the home quickly.

Goines sought nearly 100 no-knock warrants over the last 12 years of his career, according to a review of court records. In virtually every case, he said confidential informants had seen firearms in the home he wished to raid. In subsequent paperwork showing what he recovered from the raids, Goines recorded having seized firearms only once.

“It certainly raises a red flag someone should be looking at to make sure he’s not fudging the numbers,” Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina, said about Goines. “That’s a supervisory or management issue.”

RELATED: Houston police officer in drug raid had previous allegations against him

A Goines raid, in March 2013 in south Houston, ended with an officer shooting and nearly killing George Benard, brother of the suspect they were seeking, Dominick Benard. Goines had developed the case against Benard, a suspected PCP dealer, according to Goines’ search warrant affidavit. He wasn’t home that day, however. When police broke into the home, a member of the raid team said George Benard ignored commands to raise his hands and reached for a weapon. The officer shot him in the stomach.

George Benard later disputed the claim, saying he raised his hands as soon as police flooded the home.

“It happened too fast,” Benard said in court documents. “They didn’t give me a chance to say nothing, do nothing. They just came in and shot.”

He spent months in a coma. Nearly all his fingers and toes had to be amputated because of complications from the gunshot wound.

Narcotics officers filed paperwork after the raid saying they’d found 122 grams of PCP, a pistol, a shotgun and a gram of marijuana in the home.

George Benard subsequently sued Goines, the police department and the officer who shot him. A federal judge dismissed most of Benard’s claims but allowed the lawsuit against another officer to proceed. The city eventually paid $85,000 to settle the case.

‘Risk for corruption’

Soon after the raid on Harding Street, Acevedo ordered a sweeping audit of the narcotics division by one of his top lieutenants, Assistant Chief Pete Lopez.

Documents obtained through a public records request show the last time HPD audited the narcotics division was in 2000.

Experts also questioned a longstanding practice of officers remaining in narcotics for decades without rotating them to other assignments. Records show that 71 officers have spent 10 years or more in narcotics. Thirty-one officers have worked in the division for 20 years or more.

Failing to move officers out of undercover divisions or other specialized units can allow such units to foster their own identities and subcultures, warned Sam Walker, an expert on police procedure at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

“Narcotics enforcement poses high risk for corruption,” Walker said. “There need to be effective controls, including regular audits, rotation of officers, and rotation of supervisors. That’s essential. And experienced police chiefs ought to know that.”

In response to questions from the Chronicle, Acevedo said HPD is now reviewing whether to impose term limits on how long officers can remain in undercover divisions.

After the Harding raid, Acevedo vowed to equip raid teams with body cameras and curtail the use of no-knock raids. He banned officers from seeking warrants from municipal judges. Ten months after the raid, he has yet to announce the results of the department’s investigation into the shooting or any internal probes of the narcotics division.

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St. John Barned-Smith joined the Houston Chronicle in 2014 and covers public safety and major disasters. He has worked on two teams named Pulitzer finalists in recent years – for covering Hurricane Harvey and for helping show how Texas unlawfully denied education services to children with special needs. He previously reported in Philadelphia and Maryland and spent two years in the Peace Corps in Paraguay. Follow him on Twitter or email tips to st.john.smith@chron.com.

James Pinkerton contributed to this report.

Designed by Jasmine Goldband.

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