HOUSTON – Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare admitted Friday the office “made mistakes in this case” and a breakdown of communication led to the release of the suspect in a sexual assault at the University of Houston.
Eric Latroy Brown, 40, is charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault and one count of aggravated robbery after a student was attacked at the university’s Welcome Center Student Parking Garage around 5:30 p.m. last Friday.
Later that night, officers with the University of Houston Police Department who were patrolling the garage came into contact with Brown.
“They were not approaching him because he was a suspect of this sexual assault. He was acting erratically on campus,” Teare said.
As officers approached, Brown allegedly became aggressive and had to be tazed as a struggle ensued. Teare says during the struggle, Brown threw a few elbows at officers, striking one in the head.
Brown was taken to jail after the encounter. Teare explains what the district attorney’s office was told.
“They relayed that they were investigating a sexual assault, this individual potentially could match the description that we had, but that was all that was discussed on the sexual assault. What they were looking for was what we sometimes call charge holders, placeholders, making sure that we had an individual in custody while we continue an investigation on the more serious crime,” Teare said.
At the time, the two charges that were accepted were resisting arrest and assault of a public servant.
“The way that intake works is that we verbally accept the charge. The individual is taken to the joint processing center and the police officers submit a written version of the facts that they relay over the phone to the police. That lag time in this case and in most cases is between six and eight hours. A whole new set of prosecutors were on the intake desk. When those documents came across, the documents left out some key elements of the charges that we were filing, which were assault of a peace officer and resisting arrest,” Teare explained.
Teare said one of the key elements that was missing which was necessary to accept the assault of a peace officer charge was whether or not the officer had any pain.
“That is an element that we have to have in order to accept that charge. And there was no mention as to what he was under arrest for, for the resisting arrest. There was mention that he was a potential suspect in a sexual assault, but nothing that he was under arrest for,” Teare said.
According to Teare, the prosecutor who was on duty at the time tried to call the officer who filed the paperwork for more information, but he was already off-shift and was in all likelihood asleep.
“The only way we had to get in touch with them was a cell phone. We tried twice to get a hold of them. Couldn’t get a hold because our communication internally broke down from the prosecutor who accepted the charges, knowing that we were looking for a sex assault, potentially,” Teare said.
Teare explained that the information they had was not communicated to a new prosecutor who had come in after the earlier prosecutor left for the day.
“This prosecutor in the second one reviewed these charges and basically said we don’t have enough to keep these charges filed and rejected,” Teare said. “So the conversation with the first prosecutor indicated that, yes, potentially down the road this person could be responsible for the sexual assault. But everyone on that call knew that we didn’t have enough to file that case at that point. So we filed the other two that subsequently was not communicated either by UHPD or our first prosecutor to the second prosecutor who was reviewing the charge before we go in front of a magistrate to see probable cause.”
Teare says this communication breakdown highlights an issue with the intake division that they are working to fix.
“I’ve been saying for years in that the intake division inside the DA’s office is the most important division out there because when mistakes happen, when processes aren’t worked through when training isn’t at its best here, terrible things happen,” he said. “Internally we know that we need a better way to communicate from one prosecutor to the next prosecutor in the chain.”
While Teare did acknowledge the communication breakdown, he also mentioned other issues that also led to the incident.
“We’ve got to be able to work with our law enforcement partners to make sure that these kind of breakdowns don’t happen again. Because even though the communication hadn’t gone from the first prosecutor to the second prosecutor appropriately, that second prosecutor did the right thing, tried to get a hold of the officer. But we’ve got to have better ways to reach out to specific law enforcement officers that have filed charges,” he said.
Teare explained that when they are dealing with sex-related crimes, that information is supposed to be communicated with the office’s adult sex crimes division.
“We have a dedicated 24-7 phone number specifically for the intake of sexual assault cases. Our larger agencies utilized that number and those specially trained prosecutors all the time. When we’re dealing with smaller agencies that don’t file these cases as often, they’re sometimes not aware of that resource. In this case, it went directly to our intake division. Had it gone to our adult sex crimes prosecutors, we would have done what eventually happened, which is the next day, our adult sex crimes prosecutor who was on call and realized he saw the news stories and realized that he hadn’t spoken to anyone about this and he would be the only one accepting a charge like that,” Teare said.
While Teare said multiple issues contributed to the release, he took accountability and pledged to continue to work to improve things so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.
“Our office made mistakes in this case. It was a breakdown of communication. And because of it, we have a very dangerous person on the streets. And so to shift blame, to not accept your portion of the blame, it wouldn’t be honest and it wouldn’t be what I want this office to be in the future, which is when we mess up, we’re going to stand in front of the lights and say, we messed up and we’re going to get better from,” he said.