Nine undercovert officers executed a search warrant on the home just before 5 p.m. Central time Monday; four were shot, and one other officer was injured. The two people in the home, a 59-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman, were killed in the shootout, Chief Art Acevedo of the Houston Police Department said at a news conference Tuesday morning.
A Houston police official said Tuesday evening that the two most seriously wounded officers were expected to survive. They were in serious but stable condition.
A third officer, who was shot in the shoulder, had been released from the hospital Monday night, and another who was shot in the face was released Tuesday. A fifth officer, who was not shot but underwent knee surgery, was hospitalized in good condition, police said.
Earlier Tuesday, Acevedo had said that one of the seriously wounded officers was “in a really tough fight.”
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On Monday evening, the nine officers knocked down the door of a home in a working-class, neighborhood about 7 miles southeast of downtown Houston. The raid followed a tip from a neighbor that the house was being used for drug deals, the chief said.
The first officer to enter the home was immediately charged by a pit bull and shot at by the man inside the home, identified as Dennis Tuttle, Acevedo said. The officer, 33, who has been with the Police Department for 10 years, fatally shot the dog and was struck on his shoulder, falling onto the sofa.
Acevedo said that the woman in the home, Rhogena Nicholas, then reached over that officer to grab his shotgun. Backup officers then opened fire at Nicholas, he said.
At one point, Tuttle stuck his gun through the doorway and opened fire at the officers, police said.
Knowing that his fellow officers inside the house had been shot, a 54-year-old officer who had been with the department for 32 years entered the home and was shot in the face, police said. At the news conference, Acevedo said that after the raid, the officer passed a note to a colleague at the hospital. It said: “I had to get in there because I knew my guys were down,” he said.
Police said they were not publicly identifying the injured officers because of “security concerns.”
Although police had said Monday that they staged the raid because they believed black tar heroin was being dealt out of the home, the chief said the substance was not discovered during the raid. Police found marijuana and a white powdery substance that they said could be cocaine or fentanyl. They also recovered five guns, Acevedo said.
Public records indicate that Tuttle and Nicholas were married in December 1998.
For a few hours, the neighborhood was plunged into chaos, as dozens of officers — some dressed in camouflage and carrying shotguns — moved through on foot. Helicopters circled overhead. One neighbor said the area sounded like a “war zone.”
Acevedo said the turbulent raid was an example of the country’s “epidemic” of gun violence.
“We live in a society where there’s a proliferation of firearms,” he said, “where you can assume there’ll be firearms just about every location that you hit.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.