A Texas police chief is on leave after a SWAT team raided the wrong house earlier this month while searching for a teen falsely accused of murder.
Galveston Police Chief Doug Balli has been placed on 10-day administrative leave while an internal investigation is conducted. The City of Galveston is conducting a separate investigation into the communication failure that led to the raid.
A family was alarmed on January 22 by the sound of rubber bullets flying through their doors and windows in the middle of the night. The family began to panic when the Galveston Police SWAT team was standing outside their door.
Home security footage shows the four family members slowly leaving the house with their hands up. They were stopped by officers without knowing why SWAT had shown up.
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Galveston Police Chief Doug Balli has been placed on 10-day administrative leave while an internal investigation is conducted.
(City of Galveston)
“I literally kept asking my son, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’ He had no idea,” Erika Rios told FOX 26. “And he said, ‘Mom, I don’t know, I don’t know.’ We were in a panic.”
Rios’ daughter, Chelsea, was put alone in the back of a police car.
“I was there for a couple of minutes,” Chelsea said. “I was still having anxiety attacks and needed to vomit. They let me out and then told me they were just looking for Cameron, nothing more.”
The suspect was Cameron Vargas, 17, who had a warrant for his arrest in connection with the January 20 murder of Malik Dunn. But since the search was carried out at the wrong house, Vargas was not there.
A Texas police chief is on leave after the SWAT team raided the wrong house earlier this month looking for a murder suspect.
(Galveston Police)
Vargas was later arrested and held on $250,000 bond. Investigators finally realized that Vargas was not the killer and the charges against him were dropped on January 25.
“We are completely disappointed in our police department and their investigative process,” Vargas’s mother, Terry Borrell, wrote in a statement to FOX 26. “This has been a traumatic experience that no one should have to go through. His son’s innocence was proven, but he shouldn’t have spent a second in jail. Cameron is an amazing and respectful young man and he did not deserve to be smeared and wrongly accused or even viewed as a suspect.”
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The raid took place at the wrong house and the suspect SWAT was looking for was not there.
(Galveston Police)
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“The police wasted valuable time and resources on the wrong person,” he continued. “I hope that for the sake of the victim and her family, they find the real killer and go after the real criminals who lied to the police and wrongfully accused my son.”
No further arrests have been made in connection with Dunn’s murder.
