After narcotics officers knocked down the door of a Houston home, the first one to enter was greeted by a charging dog and gunfire from a man wielding a .357 Magnum revolver, the authorities said on Tuesday.

Out of the nine undercover narcotics officers who executed a search warrant on the home just before 5 p.m. on 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 on Tuesday morning.

One of the officers who was shot seemed to be in worse condition than the others. “He’s in a really tough fight,” said Chief Acevedo, who released scant information on that officer after the family requested privacy.

Two officers who were shot in the face and one who was not shot but who underwent knee surgery were hospitalized and in stable conditions, Dr. Michelle McNutt, the chief of trauma surgery at the Houston hospital where the officers were treated, said at the news conference. A fifth officer, who was shot in the shoulder, was released from the hospital on Monday, Chief Acevedo said.

On Monday evening, the nine officers knocked down the door of a home in a working-class, mostly Hispanic neighborhood about seven 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, Chief 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.

Chief 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 Ms. Nicholas, he said.

At one point, Mr. Tuttle stuck his gun through the doorway and opened fire at the officers.

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, the police said. At the news conference, Chief 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.

The police said they were not publicly identifying the injured officers because of “security concerns.”

Although the police had said on 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. The police found marijuana and a white powdery substance that they said could be cocaine or fentanyl. They also recovered five guns, Chief Acevedo said.

For a few hours, the neighborhood was plunged into chaos, as dozens of officers — some dressed in camouflage and carrying shotguns — moved through the neighborhood on foot. Helicopters circled overhead. One neighbor said the area sounded like a “war zone.”

Chief 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.”

Follow Julia Jacobs on Twitter: @juliarebeccaj.

Source: Read Full Article