Houston authorities trusted a drug agent for decades before his lies cost two people their lives

Gerald Goines, the former Houston drug agent who engineered a January 2019 drug raid that left a middle-aged couple he falsely accused of selling heroin dead, was shot in the face after he and his colleagues broke into the home where Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas lived and died. When an internal affairs investigator questioned him at the hospital after the raid, Goines could not speak because his jaw was wired shut. Instead, prosecutors said during Goines' murder trial this week, he wrote down his answers.

Sergeant Richard Bass asked Goines for the name of the informant who, according to the affidavit Goines filed the day of the raid, had purchased heroin the previous evening from a middle-aged white man at 7815 Harding Street. “There was no informant,” Goines wrote. “I made the purchase on my own.” This substitute explanation was obviously problematic: At the time of the alleged heroin purchase, Bass told the jury, Goines was eating dinner at Taste of Texas, a restaurant more than 20 miles away.

Prosecutors showed jurors a picture of Goines in the restaurant. “Investigators also found a receipt in an HPD [Houston Police Department] “At the time Goines was seen on camera, his car was out of the restaurant,” reports KTRK, the ABC affiliate in Houston. “They also found surveillance video from a neighbor that shows Goines never went to Harding Street the day before the raid.”

Since defense attorney Nicole DeBorde admitted in her opening statement that Goines lied in his affidavit and at the hospital, this evidence may seem unnecessary. But the rapid revelation of Goines' story suggests that the “pattern of deception” that local prosecutors discovered when they began re-examining his drug cases could have been discovered much earlier if someone had been paying attention.

Since the Harding Street raid, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has overturned at least 22 convictions based on Goines's obviously unreliable testimony. Those cases, like this one, involved fabricated drug purchases that Goines used as evidence for search warrants, sometimes citing the same informant as the source. For years, defendants in drug cases had complained that Goines was framing them, but no one took them seriously.

Goines' dishonesty went beyond fictitious transactions. His search warrants often described weapons that were never found. Over 12 years The Houston Chronicle Goines obtained nearly 100 no-knock search warrants, almost always claiming that informants had seen firearms in the homes he wanted to search. However, he only reported finding guns once – a suspicious pattern that apparently no one noticed.

When Goines applied for a no-knock search warrant for Tuttle and Nicholas' home, he also described a nonexistent weapon. He said his informant saw a 9mm semi-automatic pistol at 7815 Harding Street, but there was no such weapon in the house. Goines relied on this imaginary weapon to support his argument that he entered the home “without first knocking and announcing the presence and purpose of the officers executing the search warrant.” Since “a weapon was observed during the drug investigation,” he said, “such a knock and announcement would be dangerous.”

Former Municipal Judge Gordon G. Marcum II, who approved the warrant, testified that he would not have approved it if he had known that Goines had lied about the heroin purchase. But that is not exactly reassuring.

Marcum noted that it was unusual for an officer to apply for such a warrant from a municipal judge rather than a district court. He said he approved the warrant after about 20 minutes. That's not much time to carefully review an affidavit, let alone investigate its basis, and Marcum missed some obvious warning signs.

Although Goines claimed he had spent two weeks investigating drug activity at Tuttle and Nicholas's home, he had not bothered to find out who lived there. He described the suspected heroin dealer as “a white male whose name is unknown.”

At the hospital after the raid, Goines said, “I wanted to buy from a woman. I bought from the man. I had information on the people in the apartment. I'm not sure if the man I bought from was a man who was listed in the information.”

This “information” came from a neighbor, Patricia Garcia, who called 911 to report that her daughter was using heroin at 7815 Harding Street. She claimed that Tuttle and Nicholas were armed and dangerous drug dealers. But police eventually found out that Garcia, who didn't even have a daughter, had made the whole thing up. In March 2021, she pleaded guilty to charges related to her fraudulent 911 calls and was later sentenced to 40 months in prison.

Officers Richard Morales and Nicole Blankenship-Reeves were assigned to follow up on Garcia's tip. Blankenship-Reeves “visited the home and found no signs of criminal activity.” The Houston Chronicle reported. Lt. Marsha Todd, who was dating Blankenship-Reeves, nevertheless urged her friend to “write down her information about the house and give it to her.” Based on an unconfirmed tip that turned out to be nothing more than the lies of a neighbor who bore a grudge against Nicholas, Todd left a “handwritten memo” for Goines to investigate the matter further.

It seems clear that Goines did not do that, and the fact that he did not even know the name of the “white male” who allegedly sold heroin to a confidential informant was an obvious clue to Marcum that the basis for the warrant was shaky. Another clue: In his affidavit, Goines said he “informed” his informant that the house was being used for “selling and storing narcotics,” but he offered no evidence to support this. It does not appear that Marcum, who he says spent a full 20 minutes reading the affidavit and approving the warrant, attempted to assess the thoroughness of Goines' alleged investigation.

Goines' colleagues also had reason to doubt that he knew much about the people whose house they were about to raid. Although he “informed a tactical team that there was no dog in the targets' house,” chronicle Morales reportedly testified that he told Goines that wasn't true. Morales said Tuttle and Nicholas had a dog that another officer had seen in the front yard weeks earlier.

The couple actually had two dogs, one of which was killed by a police officer with a shotgun immediately after Goines and his colleagues broke into the house. This detail proved crucial, as the officers' first shot sparked a gunfight that killed the homeowners and injured Goines and three other officers.

Prosecutors said Tuttle was taking a nap in a bedroom when police broke down the door and killed his dog. “Mr. Tuttle reacted like any normal person who hears gunshots in his house, the doors smashed, his wife on the couch, the dog dead in the living room,” Harris County Assistant District Attorney Keaton Forcht told the jury on Monday. “He grabs his gun and storms out.”

In contrast, Art Acevedo, then Houston's police chief, placed the blame for the violence squarely on Tuttle and Nicholas, whom he described as dangerous criminals who ran a locally notorious “drug house” where police “actually bought black tar heroin.” Acevedo praised the police officers – especially Goines – as “heroes” and claimed that neighbors were grateful to the officers for their brave intervention.

The evidence of Goines' deception eventually forced Acevedo to revise that account. However, he continued to describe the other officers as “heroes” and even insisted that they “had a reasonable reason to be there.” This claim is in stark contrast to the prosecution's evidence against Goines and the federal indictment charging him with deadly Fourth Amendment violations.

The police obviously did it not “reasonable reason for being there,” and that fact should have been clear to Marcum if he had thoroughly interrogated Goines. Yet if the raid had not gone horribly wrong, most people would have continued to believe the story Acevedo originally told. Had Goines not been shot during the police raid on Tuttle and Nicholas's home, he would have been able to falsify evidence to support his false claims and would have continued to accuse people he believed to be guilty without hindrance.

When he resigned in disgrace after the Harding Street raid, Goines had been a Houston police officer for more than 30 years. Yet despite being accused of perjury and making a number of claims that could not be independently verified, no one in a position of authority questioned his honesty until it was too late.