JOGL: Drawing Sprites on Points

Question

I have a high energy physics application that displays particle detectors. I draw hits in the detectors as points. But the points in basic jogl/opengl seem to be just squares. So what I would like to do is draw small images (pngs) at the points. So the basic problem is: draw images from png files (resources) at points.

I start by loading the image from a jar file via

 _sprite = TextureIO.newTexture(_url, false, ".png");

this seems to work fine. For instance, the sprite reports the correct image size.Then I try to draw the (same sprite) at a set of points using

public static void drawSprites(GLAutoDrawable drawable, float coords[],
    Texture sprite, float size) {

  GL2 gl = drawable.getGL().getGL2();
  gl.glPointSize(size);
  sprite.bind(gl);

//how many points?
  int np = coords.length / 3;

  gl.glBegin(GL.GL_POINTS);

  for (int i = 0; i < np; i++) {
      int j = i * 3;
      gl.glVertex3f(coords[j], coords[j + 1], coords[j + 2]);
  }
  gl.glEnd();
}

But all I get are the points-- i.e. squares. The squares are at the right location--but they are just squares. No images.