Court documents reveal origins of botched narcotics raid on Harding Street

[Elderberry]

Houston Chronicle by  St. John Barned-Smith and Keri Blakinger 8/24/2019

A recently surfaced tip scrawled on a yellow legal pad that a southeast patrol officer passed to a narcotics lieutenant she was romantically involved with apparently triggered the botched drug raid that resulted in murder charges against a Houston police officer, according to probable cause affidavits.

Former HPD officer Gerald Goines, 54, faces two felony murder counts in the January deaths of homeowners Rhogena “Reggie” Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle. His partner, Steven Bryant, has been charged with tampering with a government document. Both men turned themselves in late Friday and were later released on bail.

While the department has divulged some aspects of what led up to the raid, the new documents provide the most detailed explanation so far about how a seemingly mundane patrol call led to a deadly confrontation. Serious questions about the department protocol used to defend the no-knock raid remain, particularly in regards to the informal nature that the complaint was logged and circulated.

“The only justification that the police keep clinging to is, ‘We really did have probable cause,’” said Mike Doyle, an attorney representing family members of Nicholas and Tuttle. “That’s apparently the only thing they have to stop them from owning up to that they never should have been there.”

The home first came under scrutiny after a Jan. 8 call to police from an anonymous woman who said her daughter was using drugs in the house with a woman named “Reggie,” according to the court documents filed Friday.

The caller told police that she’d seen multiple guns in the home and that the people inside would not cooperate with law enforcement.

Nicole Blankinship-Reeves and her partner, Officer R. Morales, visited the house but did not find an indication of criminal activity, the records show, but contacted the original tipster, the caller insisted officers enter the home.

Blankinship-Reeves continued to research the home but didn’t take any further action that day, according to the court documents. Instead, she jotted her notes down on a yellow legal pad and turned it over to her girlfriend, Marsha Todd, a lieutenant who oversees the narcotics division’s FAST squad, which handles the division’s civil asset forfeiture cases. Three days later, Todd relayed the tip to Goines, who worked on a different squad in the same division. On Jan. 28, Goines sought a no-knock warrant from a municipal court judge. Several hours later, he and 10 other narcotics officers raided the Harding Street home.

The department’s Harding Street bust went awry almost immediately after narcotics officers burst into the home, shooting a dog they say lunged at them and sparking a gun battle.

As police probed the incident in the days that followed, investigators realized they couldn’t verify Goines’ claims about the drug buy he’d used as the basis for the raid and that he may have fabricated information used in a sworn affidavit he used to obtain the warrant he used to raid the home.

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Court-documents-reveal-origins-of-botched-HPD-14376439.php

[IsailedawayfromFR]

To me, this is the crux and should be grounds for firing Acevedo and any of his subordinates complicit in raid for incompetence.  There are people dead as a result:

Roger Clark, a former narcotics lieutenant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, said while informal tips can lead to investigations, the situation in the Harding Street raid raised serious questions about HPD’s policies on passing information from one command to another.

“What you’ve got is stationhouse gossip, and from that an officer fabricated a warrant which turns to be really bad and led in death,” he said. “Had officers followed the normal procedure here, it may have prevented this from developing the way it did.”

Sam Walker, an expert on police procedure at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, said the information in the documents point to potentially serious problems about vetting information and lack of control for officers who routinely engage in dangerous operations.

“It begins to move into gossip and second-hand information,” he said. “That’s the reason for good chain of command procedures.”

[Sanguine]

An anonymous tip?