Early in the morning of May 10, someone allegedly smelled pot coming from an apartment in a Kingwood complex. Whoever it was called the cops, and the cops apparently found a lot of pot.
"They started making jokes as if, oh we already know what's going on, stuff like that," 19-year-old Nicholas Hill said.
Hill was inside that apartment, and was arrested for drug possession. Now, it's the officers under internal police investigation.
Here's one of the text messages we found between officers on their in-car computers: At 1:29am, one officer writes one officer to another, "We just got 5lb of marijuana and a ton of other crap."
Sitting in their police cars in a Kingwood parking lot, that's what Houston cops bragged to each other what they'd found. The problem for them is that when they got downtown, it's not what they turned in.
When the officers showed up at the city jail to book Hill a short time later and turn in their evidence, the five pounds of marijuana they bragged about an hour earlier somehow had become a pound and a half.
HPD can't tell us where it went and the District Attorney's Office won't talk about the case. But other text messages may help fill in the picture.
We first told you 10 days ago about Hill's claims that during the arrest cops found some pot brownies and allegedly ate them.
"She saw the police officers pick up the brownies and, like, eat a couple of them, take bites of it," he said.
And to back it up, we showed you the officers' messages.
"'So high' - spaced out, h-i-g-h," said Hill's attorney, Daniel Cahill.
Hill's lawyers found them and let us see them. At 2:44 that morning, an hour after finding five pounds of marijuana, "So H I G H!" "Good munchies" writes another officer. Reassuringly, the first writes back, "Everything should be open when we get done."
"Shocked that this type of official misconduct would happen and on such a record that is so well documented," Hill's other attorney, J. Julio Vela said.
The officers are under investigation. Internal Affairs is working on it. But even after we told HPD about this most recent development, their status hasn't changed. They remain out on the street on patrol.
Hill is due back in court next week.
The Houston Police Department has until next March to wrap up its investigation of the officers involved. They won't tell us the status of their probe.
