Left to right -
Joe Vara, Assistant Chief Investigator
John Boone, Chief, Check Fraud Division
Senior Investigator Mike Terry
Chuck Rosenthal (r), District Attorney
All with the Harris County District Attorney's Office
and Greg Walker (m), Esq., ARM, CPP

Senior Investigator Mike Terry has been with the Harris County District Attorney's Office 15 years. He retired from the Houston Police Department with 20 years of service. He received his B.A. Degree from University of St. Thomas and his Masters Degree from Sam Houston State University. He has a Master Law Enforcement certification from the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement. Mike is currently assigned to the Public Service Bureau, Check Fraud Division.

An example of Investigator Terry going the Extra Mile: One of Investigator Terry's duties is to review old no-arrest cases to determine why the defendant has not been arrested. He picked up a case in which the defendant had, in April of 2003, written a $15,000 bad check as the down payment on a new Audi automobile.

Investigator Terry discovered that the defendant was on probation in another county for Possession of a Controlled Substance. Investigator Terry called the defendant's probation officer, got the defendant’s phone number and spoke to the defendant. The defendant had an explanation.

According to the defendant, the dealership pressured him into taking the Audi car rather than the Mercedes he wanted, and agreed to accept a postdated check as the down payment. He was, he said, “baited and switched”. Furthermore, because the defendant is a large person, he did not fit well in the Audi. He returned it to the dealer after just a week and gave the keys back to the salesman. He did not realize that the check had been “put through” until he spoke with Investigator Terry. Now that defendant had been located, it would have been a simple matter to have him arrested; however, Investigator Terry understood that the case would not be worth much if we could not contradict the defendant’s story. A call to the dealership confirmed that no one there remembered this transaction, and they have a strict policy against taking postdated checks.

Investigator Terry ran the title history, and found that the car is currently registered in Georgia. The current owner told him he bought the car from Brand Spankin Used Autos. They bought it through Trinity Auto Auction from VW Credit. VW Credit is the parent of Audi Finance. Investigator Terry obtained the records on the car from VW Credit. They show that VW had the car repossessed on September 3, 2003, in front of the Defendant’s house, more than four months after he had written the bad check for it. Audi’s records have a printout of collection attempts, including numerous promises from the defendant to pay what he owed, and his inquiry about how to get the car back once it had been repossessed. The defendant assumed that no one would go to the trouble of checking his story, and that the records of the transaction would be gone after three years.

This case is an illustration typical of Mike Terry’s work. He could have had the defendant arrested, and then gone on to other tasks. But instead, he took the additional time and effort and turned a weak case into a strong one while taking a repeat offender off of the streets.