The Harris County District Attorney says a breakdown in communication led to the release of the sex assault suspect on the University of Houston's campus last week.
On Friday, Harris County DA Sean Teare admitted that his office “made mistakes in this case” and now there is a dangerous person back out on the streets.
“It was a breakdown of communication," he said. "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."
Eric Latroy Brown, 40, is accused of attacking a student at the Welcome Center Student Parking Garage on campus at around 5:30 p.m. last Friday. He's been charged with two counts of aggravated sexual assault and one count of aggravated robbery.
Brown was arrested by officers with the University of Houston Police Department following the incident and then taken to jail. According to Teare, the two charges that were accepted at that time were resisting arrest and assault of a public servant.
The communication breakdown came from an issue with the intake division. Teare said 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 finished with his shift.
“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 said.
Teare said they have to be better and make sure something like this never happens again.
“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,” said Teare.