A white Fort Worth police officer who shot and killed a black woman through a back window of her home while responding to a call about an open front door was on Monday evening charged with murder after resigning from the force.
Aaron Dean, 34, was jailed on US$200,000 bond after the police chief said he acted without justification and would have been fired if he had not quit.
Police bodycam video showed Dean approaching the door of the home where Atatiana Jefferson, 28, was caring for her eight-year-old nephew early on Saturday.
Photo: AP
He then walked around the side of the house, pushed through a gate into the fenced-off backyard and fired through the glass a split-second after shouting at Jefferson to show her hands.
Dean was not heard identifying himself as police on the video, and Forth Worth Interim Police Chief Ed Kraus said there was no sign Dean or the other officer who responded even knocked on the front door.
“Nobody looked at this video and said that there’s any doubt that this officer acted inappropriately,” Kraus said.
Earlier in the day, Jefferson’s family had demanded that Dean, a member of the force for one-and-a-half years, be fired and arrested.
“Why this man is not in handcuffs is a source of continued agitation for this family and for this community,” family attorney Lee Merritt said, hours before Dean was booked into jail.
Police went to Jefferson’s home about 2:25am after a neighbor called a non-emergency line to report a door ajar.
In a statement over the weekend, the Fort Worth Police Department said officers saw someone near a window inside the home, and that one of them drew his gun and fired after “perceiving a threat.”
The video showed Dean shouting: “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” and immediately firing.
Jefferson was staying up late, playing video games with her nephew, when she was killed, according to the family’s attorney.
As for what, exactly, led Dean to open fire, the police chief said: “I cannot make sense of why she had to lose her life.”
The chief said Dean resigned without talking to internal affairs investigators.
The video included images of a gun inside a bedroom. Kraus said he did not know whether Jefferson was holding the weapon.
However, he said the mere fact she had a gun should not be considered unusual in Texas.
“We’re homeowners in Texas,” the police chief said. “Most of us, if we thought we had somebody outside our house that shouldn’t be and we had access to a firearm, we would be acting very similarly to how she was acting.”
Kraus said that, in hindsight, releasing the images of the weapon was “a bad thing to do.”
Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price called the gun “irrelevant.”
“Atatiana was in her own home, caring for her eight-year-old nephew. She was a victim,” Price said.
Texas has had a “castle doctrine” law on the books since 2007 that gives people a stronger legal defense to use deadly force in their homes.
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