Texas police chief on leave after SWAT team raids the wrong house
Conrad Hoyt
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The police chief of Galveston, Texas, is on leave after a SWAT team reportedly raided the wrong home earlier this month in search of a teenager falsely accused of murder.
Chief Doug Balli was placed on a 10-day administrative leave while an internal investigation is conducted with the City of Galveston also separately investigating the miscommunication that allowed the incorrect raid to take place, Fox News reported.
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The news outlet said a family woke up in the middle of the night on Jan. 22nd to rubber bullets flying through their doors and windows. The Galveston Police SWAT team was standing right outside their door.
With shattered windows, a bashed-in door, ripped-out wiring, and more than a dozen fired “flashbangs,” City Manager Brian Maxwell said the raid did an estimated $5,000 in damage to the family’s home, the Galveston County Daily News reported. “There was a major breakdown in communication and we want to figure out why the city was not in the loop,” Maxwell said.
The local outlet added that the SWAT team was searching for 17-year-old Cameron Vargas, who they believed was involved in the shooting death of 25-year-old Malik Dunn two days before.
But officers were not at the home of Vargas, who later turned himself in to authorities and had the charges against him dropped. They were at Erika Rios’s home. Rios told the Galveston County Daily News that her teenage son and daughter, as well as a friend, were injured in the raid and she herself was dragged from her home.
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Maxwell said he hoped to reinstate Balli as police chief before the end of the 10-day leave, but that will be determined by the length of the investigation.
Galveston is an island city just south of Houston, home to about 50,000 people.