Forensic review raises more raid questions
Expert hired by family of victim says man shot in back; police union doubts validity
Forensics experts hired by relatives of a Navy veteran killed in a shootout with Houston police during a drug raid this year determined he was shot in the back, according to findings released Wednesday.
The investigator, Michael Maloney, said officers who raided the home of Dennis Tuttle and his wife Rhogena Nicholas in January looking for drugs may have been at the doorway and able see inside the house when they fired the shots that killed Tuttle.
Maloney based his conclusions off a review of evidence he uncovered at the home, an examination of bullet holes to determine their trajectories and autopsy reports from the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.
The findings provide additional details to Maloney’s initial report in July, in which he concluded officers fired some shots through the home’s exterior wall — meaning they were unable to see anyone inside — including the round that killed Nicholas.
His most recent findings also suggest that Tuttle may have been lying on the ground when one of the shots hit him.
To attorney Mike Doyle, who is representing the Nicholas family as they move toward suing the city, the most recent analysis comes as a further indication that officials aren’t being transparent.
“There’s every indication that the story they gave about what happened is not true,” he said. “Everybody is ignoring what happened at the scene, because they don’t have this.”
Chief Art Acevedo declined to comment Wednesday, citing the ongoing criminal prosecution of the two officers at the center of the case. Houston Police Officers’ Union President Joe Gamaldi questioned the validity of Maloney’s work.
“I would trust a report from the Houston Forensic Science Center, the Texas Rangers or the Houston Police Department,” Gamaldi said, “not a report from a private entity that is hired by future plaintiffs.”
Though the Houston Police Department completed a review of the case in May and forwarded the matter to prosecutors, authorities have yet to release a full accounting of the shots fired during the Pecan Park raid.
Police launched a no-knock drug raid at 7815 Harding St. on the afternoon of Jan. 28, hoping to find heroin dealers. Instead, they found a couple in their 50s with small, user-level amounts of cocaine and marijuana.
But the intrusion sparked a gun battle after police fired at a pit bull dog in the living room. Tuttle, according to police, came running out from the back of the house and opened fire, while Nicholas allegedly scuffled with an officer over a weapon before she was shot. In the end, both homeowners died, and five officers were wounded or injured.
The would-be bust quickly devolved into scandal after Acevedo said case agent Gerald Goines apparently lied in order to get a warrant for the raid. Months later, prosecutors charged the 32-year veteran officer with felony murder while his partner, Steven Bryant, was charged with tampering with a government record. They did not face any internal discipline as they had both already retired.
Early on, the FBI launched a civil rights investigation, and Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg dismissed dozens of the officers’ active cases and announced prosecutors were reviewing more than 14,000 cases previously handled by Goines, Bryant and the rest of their squad.
While authorities pursued their probes, Doyle hired an outside consultant — forensics expert Maloney — to review the case on his own. After combing through the couple’s home for four days in May, the retired supervisory special agent with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service found dozens of pieces of evidence that the city’s crime scene teams had left behind, including teeth and bullet fragments. At the time, Doyle said the missed evidence could be a sign of a lackluster 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,” he said. “That’s the whole point of forensic scene documentation. That’s the basic check on people just making stuff up.”
In July, Maloney released more findings, suggesting police fired from outside the home and questioning whether Tuttle ever fired back.
The additional findings released this week showed that Tuttle was upright when he was hit by what was likely one of the officers’ first shots, which then hit Nicholas and ended up carrying DNA from both of them. Another bullet — one of a number of potentially fatal shots — was fired when Tuttle had his back turned, and it hit the back of his neck, emerging from his jaw.
“Then he probably dropped to the ground,” Maloney said.
A later shot, fired from somewhere around Tuttle’s feet, traveled up his body and grazed the 59-year-old’s chest, tearing out fragments of his sweatshirt, before lodging in his head. According to Maloney, that trajectory suggests Tuttle was “horizontal, and on or close to the floor” when the shooter fired.
In total, Maloney’s review could account for at least eight of the shots that hit Nicholas and Tuttle. Three or four of the shots that hit Tuttle struck him from behind, Maloney said. Though the sequence of the shots isn’t clear, Maloney suggested the shots from behind may have come as Tuttle was trying to retreat back into the house after being shot the first time.
HPD officials have consistently maintained that Tuttle shot all four wounded officers and dispute theories that police may have been wounded by friendly fire.
As he has in the past, Doyle criticized the police department and Houston city officials for ignoring requests for information and delaying efforts to depose officers in court.
“We’ve not received anything from HPD other than, like, two pages of a call sheet,” he said. “Everything else has been stonewalled.”
Without more information, Maloney said, it could be hard to figure out the sequence of the shots or who fired them. He likened reconstructing a crime scene with limited information to solving a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces: Both are difficult, but how difficult depends on what is missing.
“Some pieces are more important than others,” he said. “And we have some solid corner pieces.”