4 Houston Police Officers Are Shot in Gun Battle That Kills 2 Suspects

CreditCreditBrett Coomer/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

HOUSTON — Four undercover narcotics officers in Houston were shot Monday evening and another police officer was also injured during a gun battle that broke out when they tried to serve a search warrant, the Houston Police Department said. Two suspects were killed.

The police officers were part of a team that was trying to search a home in a working-class, mostly Hispanic neighborhood about seven miles southeast of downtown Houston. The police believed drugs, including black tar heroin, were being dealt out of the home.

At about 5 p.m. Central time, the police knocked down the door and were met with gunfire by an unknown number of people.

Police officers returned fire, and during the exchange, two suspects were killed.

Two officers were shot in the neck and were in critical but stable condition Monday night, Chief Art Acevedo of the Houston police said at a news conference. Two other officers who were shot were being observed at a hospital, but were expected to make a full recovery.

A fifth officer was injured in the knee, but further details were not immediately available.

“One of the calls you never want to get as a chief is you’ve had an officer shot,” Chief Acevedo said.

The shooting plunged the area into chaos for about three hours.

Dozens of police officers, some dressed in camouflage and carrying shotguns, scoured the neighborhood on foot. The lights of police cruisers flashed in the darkness near Harding Street, a small road where the shooting occurred that is lined mostly by single-story homes with small yards. Helicopters circled overhead and residents stood outside their homes, talking in groups of three or four.

Veronica Bonilla, 45, was watching TV after work when she heard half a dozen gunshots ring out from the house two doors down. Within seconds, she said, the neighborhood sounded like a war zone.

“At first I thought it was someone working on their house, like with a nail gun, so I thought ‘O.K.,’” she said. “Then all of a sudden I heard a lot of yelling and a lot of gunfire. I threw myself on the floor and I called 911 and I said, ‘There is a shootout here!’”

Ms. Bonilla drew the curtains, locked the door and called her husband, who couldn’t get home from work because the police locked down the neighborhood.

Soon friends and relatives began calling: Local news stations were broadcasting from the scene of the shootout, and Ms. Bonilla’s house was on TV.

“Honey, let me tell you, I am locked in the house and I cannot leave,” she said. “It is so scary. It is crazy.”

Sofia Franco, 53, a longtime resident, passed out bottles of water. She did not hear any gunshots, but said the shooting left her and her neighbors rattled.

“I’ve never seen this before,” she said of the neighborhood. “There was a lot of drugs before, maybe 10 years ago. But I’ve never seen this. It’s sad. It’s five police officers.”

Residents of the area told television reporters that they could hear police officers speaking through bullhorns. Ms. Bonilla said she saw two SWAT officers standing on the roof of her neighbor’s house.

Chief Acevedo said later Monday night that a neighbor had tipped off the police that drugs were being dealt out of a home on Harding Street. About a dozen narcotics police officers and a half-dozen patrol officers were part of the team that was executing the search warrant Monday.

The police initially believed that five officers had been shot, but later said four were shot and the other injured in a different way. Those shot included two 50-year-old sergeants and a 54-year-old officer who has been with the department since 1984.

“This has been a tough day for our city,” Mayor Sylvester Turner said. “Our job is to keep people safe in our city. I want to be very clear, we do not tolerate any sort of activity, whether it is drug activity, drug trafficking, whatever it may be, we don’t tolerate it in our city.”

Manny Fernandez reported from Houston, and Mihir Zaveri and Liam Stack from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: 5 Officers Hurt in Gunfight; Two Suspects Are Killed. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe