Police Abuse

The 5th Circuit Says a Houston Cop Reasonably Killed 2 Innocent People Falsely Accused of Selling Heroin

The officer's avowed reasons for killing Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas were contradicted by the physical evidence.

Jacob Sullum | 7.2.2026 5:10 PM

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Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle (HPD/SynapseX/Wikimedia Commons/Wirestock/Envato)

Former Houston narcotics officer Gerald Goines is serving a 60-year sentence for his role in a 2019 drug raid that killed a middle-aged couple, Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, whom he falsely accused of selling heroin. But the officer who actually killed Tuttle and Nicholas was Felipe Gallegos, whose justification for the shots he fired at them was inconsistent with the forensic evidence.

This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit nevertheless concluded that Gallegos "acted like an objectively reasonable officer during a tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving gunfight." Because the decision focuses on one officer's culpability, it glides over a seemingly pertinent fact: The cops started that gunfight. The chaos they created then became an excuse for killing Tuttle and Nicholas.

The 5th Circuit overruled U.S. District Court Judge Alfred Bennett, who last year allowed relatives of Tuttle and Nicholas to proceed with their civil rights claims against Gallegos. Bennett thought those claims, which alleged excessive use of force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, hinged on factual disputes that would have to be resolved at trial.

Not so, the 5th Circuit said in Tuttle v. Gallegos. Given the chaotic situation that Gallegos faced, Judge Edith Brown Clement says in an opinion joined by the two other members of the panel, the courts should not "second-guess" his "split-second decisions," even if his account of what happened that day is not true and even if neither Tuttle nor Nicholas actually posed a threat when he killed them.

It is "undisputed," Clement concedes, that Gallegos and the eight other officers who invaded the couple's home should not have been there at all. "This case's genesis began on January 8, 2019, when Patricia Garcia, Tuttle and Nicholas's neighbor, repeatedly called 911 and falsely claimed that her daughter was doing drugs inside Tuttle and Nicholas's house," she notes, adding that "the falsehoods did not end with Garcia."

Goines, who was assigned to follow up on Garcia's malicious and mendacious tip, obtained a no-knock search warrant by describing a heroin sale that never happened. Officer Steven Bryant, who would later plead guilty to falsifying records and obstructing the federal investigation of the raid, backed up that phony story.

Goines and Bryant were part of the "entry team" that executed the search warrant. The other officers, including Gallegos, presumably did........

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