HOUSTON – After nearly a year, an indictment is now secured against a former Houston Police Department captain who was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon following a fake voter fraud incident.
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A Harris County grand jury indicted Mark Aguirre in a case being prosecuted by the Public Corruption Division of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.
Aguirre, a former Houston police captain who was no longer on the force at the time of the incident, first came to authorities with claims of pre-election fraud, but was himself charged in December 2020 for running a man off the road and pointing a gun at his head in order to try to prove his claims.
When presented with all the evidence, a grand jury Tuesday determined that there was probable cause for a crime and indicted Aguirre.
“He crossed the line from dirty politics to the commission of a violent crime and we are lucky no one was killed,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg has said about the case. “His alleged investigation was backward from the start, first alleging a crime occurred and then trying to prove it happened.”
According to a previously filed court document describing probable cause for the charge, Aguirre told police shortly after the Oct. 19 incident that he was part of a group of private citizens called “Liberty Center,” who were conducting a civilian investigation into an alleged ballot scheme. Aguirre said he had been conducting surveillance on the victim for four days under the theory the victim was the mastermind of a giant fraud, and there were 750,000 fraudulent ballots in a truck that he was driving, according to the document. Instead, the victim turned out to be an air-conditioner repairman.
The document also includes information alleging Aguirre ran his personal SUV into the back of the truck to get the technician to stop and get out. When the technician got out of the truck, Aguirre reportedly pointed a handgun at the technician and forced him to the ground and put a knee on the man’s back – an image captured on the body-worn camera of a police officer.
There were no ballots in the truck, authorities said. Instead, it was filled with air-conditioning parts and tools.
According to a news release about the indictment from the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, Aguirre never told police that he had been paid a total of $266,400 by the Houston-based Liberty Center for God and Country, $211,400 of which was deposited into his account the day after the incident.
The second-degree felony charge in which Aguirre faces is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
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