The CID Lieutenant, call him Lt. Bob, had written the affidavit and obtained the search warrant while a senior detective, call him Sam, and I watched the house. Sam had received information from a “reliable informant” that drugs were being repackaged in the house. We radioed the lieutenant with the information and asked him to get a search warrant while we kept an eye on the house to make sure nobody left before we had the warrant in hand.
It was a run-down neighborhood of frame houses that had been starter homes in the 1930s. The houses were marked by lopsided porches, missing roof shingles, peeling paint, weeds, falling down fences, narrow driveways of cracked concrete, and decades old cars, some on blocks, some presumably still running.
The lieutenant arrived an hour later with the warrant and we met him a block from the house, but where we could keep an eye on the driveway. We went over our plan for how we would converge on the house, who would cover which door, what we could expect in the way of resistance, etc.
Then Lt. Bob handed the search warrant to Detective Sam.
“You got this warrant for the wrong address!” Sam exclaimed. Sure enough, somehow Lt. Bob had obtained a search warrant for a house on the wrong side of the street a block down from the house Sam and I had been watching. The warrant was clearly NOT for the house Sam’s informant had described.
After some heated argument between Sam and Lt. Bob, the lieutenant grabbed the warrant out of Sam’s hand and taking his ballpoint pen, he scratched out the address printed on the warrant and wrote in the correct address in his own handwriting.
I objected that the warrant altered in that fashion was not a valid search and arrest warrant. Then the lieutenant and I got into an argument over the legality of the altered warrant. In the end, with both Sam and me frustrated by the bone-headed actions of our lieutenant, we reluctantly proceeded with our plan and the three of us ran the search warrant on the correct house, the one we had been watching all along. Our only defense would have been that we were following direct orders from our supervisor.
Frankly, since this occurred back in the late 1970s, I do not even remember whether we found any narcotics or arrested anyone. But the alarm I felt at a CID lieutenant simply scratching out printed information on a search warrant to write in different information sticks with me to this day. Such was the way in small town, rural police departments in West Texas in the 1970s, I guess.