On the night of September 6, 2018, 26-year-old accountant Botham Jean was murdered when off-duty
Dallas Police Department
The Dallas Police Department, established in 1881, is the principal law enforcement agency serving the city of Dallas, Texas.
Organization
The department is headed by a chief of police who is appointed by the city manager who, in turn, is hir ...
patrol officer
A patrol is commonly a group of personnel, such as law enforcement officers, military personnel, or security personnel, that are assigned to monitor or secure a specific geographic area.
Etymology
From French ''patrouiller'', from Old F ...
Amber Guyger entered Jean's apartment in
Dallas, Texas and fatally shot him. Guyger, who said that she had entered Jean's apartment believing it was her own and believed Jean to be a burglar,
was initially charged with
manslaughter
Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th cen ...
. The absence of a murder charge led to protests and accusations of racial bias, since Jean was black and unarmed and was killed in his own home by a white off-duty officer who had apparently disregarded police protocols. On November 30, 2018, Guyger was indicted on a charge of
murder
Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification (jurisprudence), justification or valid excuse (legal), excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought. ("The killing of another person wit ...
. On October 1, 2019, she was found guilty of murder, and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment the following day.
The ruling was upheld on appeal in 2021.
Murder
Botham Jean and Amber Guyger lived in South Side Flats, a four-story apartment complex located at the corner of South Lamar Street and Powhattan Street—two blocks northwest of the headquarters of
Dallas Police Department
The Dallas Police Department, established in 1881, is the principal law enforcement agency serving the city of Dallas, Texas.
Organization
The department is headed by a chief of police who is appointed by the city manager who, in turn, is hir ...
, for which Guyger worked as a patrol officer—in the
Cedars district in
South Dallas. The floor plans for each level of the building are mostly identical. Guyger's apartment on the third floor (number 1378), in which she had lived for approximately two months by the time of the murder, was located directly below Jean's apartment on the fourth floor (number 1478).
On September 6, 2018, Guyger left work at 9:33 p.m. at the end of a 13.5-hour shift. She drove to the apartment complex, parking her vehicle in the parking garage of the fourth floor at 9:46 pm.
At this time, she was speaking over the phone with her partner, who had telephoned her during her journey home, in a conversation which lasted until 9:55 pm. Still armed with a handgun but no longer wearing a
body camera
A body camera, bodycam, body worn video (BWV), body-worn camera, or wearable camera is a wearable audio, video, or photographic recording system.
Body cameras have a range of uses and designs, of which the best-known use is as a part of poli ...
, Guyger walked to Jean's apartment, supposedly believing it was her own and failing to notice any signs that she was on the wrong floor, including a distinctive red doormat outside the apartment. Attempting to unlock the door, she noticed it was ajar. She entered the apartment and found Jean, who was sitting in his living room eating ice cream, unarmed.
Guyger fired her handgun twice at Jean, striking him in the chest. She would later testify that she believed him to be an intruder, and that she feared he would kill her.
Guyger telephoned
9-1-1
, usually written 911, is an emergency telephone number for the United States, Canada, Mexico, Panama, Palau, Argentina, Philippines, Jordan, as well as the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), one of eight N11 codes. Like other emergency nu ...
at 9:59 pm. Jean was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died from his wound. The
Texas Rangers investigated the shooting, which led to Guyger's arrest three days later.
Guyger was initially charged with manslaughter, but was later charged with murder.
The initial charge of manslaughter and the racial aspect of the shooting resulted in protests in the following days.
The Dallas Police Department placed Guyger on
paid administrative leave after the shooting. The department fired her on September 24, 2018.
Victim
Botham Shem Jean, a 26-year-old
black man, was a
Harding University
Harding University is a private university with its main campus in Searcy, Arkansas. It is the largest private university in Arkansas. Established in 1924, the institution offers undergraduate, graduate, and pre-professional programs. The uni ...
alumnus and an accountant for
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Jean was born in
Saint Lucia
Saint Lucia ( acf, Sent Lisi, french: Sainte-Lucie) is an island country of the West Indies in the eastern Caribbean. The island was previously called Iouanalao and later Hewanorra, names given by the native Arawaks and Caribs, two Amerindian ...
.
Following the shooting, an attorney representing Jean's family accused the Dallas Police Department of attempting to smear Jean's reputation by publicizing a police affidavit showing that police seized of marijuana from Jean's apartment. The lawyers also disputed the account of the incident that Guyger told officials, which was recorded in the arrest warrant
affidavit, and asserted that two independent witnesses had come forward to give recollections that conflicted with Guyger's account. An attorney for Jean asserted that witnesses claimed they heard knocking on the door to Jean's apartment and that a witness claimed they heard a woman's voice saying "Let me in, let me in."
Perpetrator
Amber Renée Guyger (born August 9, 1988) was 30 years old at the time of the shooting. She had been on the Dallas police force for almost five years.
Trial
On November 30, 2018, Guyger was indicted on murder charges by a Dallas County
grand jury
A grand jury is a jury—a group of citizens—empowered by law to conduct legal proceedings, investigate potential criminal conduct, and determine whether criminal charges should be brought. A grand jury may subpoena physical evidence or a pe ...
. On September 22, 2019, the day before the trial began, Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot took part in an interview regarding the trial in spite of a gag order issued by Judge Tammy Kemp in January of that year. After questioning jurors, who reported that they had not seen the interview or other media coverage of the trial, Kemp denied the defense's motion for a mistrial, and sequestered the jury.
Manslaughter charges would have merely required proof of recklessness, while murder charges require proof that the defendant intended to kill.
[ The prosecutors alleged criminal intent for two reasons: firstly, they said her arrival at the wrong apartment (on the wrong floor) was not caused by tiredness, but rather caused by the conversation she had immediately prior with her lover trying to arrange a meeting that night, and secondly that she did not follow standard police protocol of not entering a building with a potential burglar inside and instead calling for backup from the police station, which was only two blocks away.
On October 1, 2019, Guyger was found guilty of murder.] The jury deliberated for six hours to reach the verdict of murder.[ The jurors also considered the lesser charge of manslaughter.][ She was the first Dallas police officer to be convicted of murder since the 1973 murder of Santos Rodriguez.][
On October 2, 2019, Guyger was sentenced to 10 years in prison after the jury deliberated for an hour.] During the sentencing hearing, Jean's mother Allison provided emotional testimony and some of Guyger's text messages and social media posts that were "racist and offensive" were shared. Jean's younger brother Brandt forgave and hugged Guyger during her sentencing. Jean's father Bertrum also stated that he forgave Guyger but had wanted a stiffer sentence. Trial judge Tammy Kemp, who is also African-American, drew controversy when she embraced Guyger and handed her a Bible, with the Freedom from Religion Foundation criticizing her for alleged proselytizing.
On October 16, 2019, Guyger's attorneys filed a notice of appeal requesting a new trial. On August 7, 2020, Guyger's attorneys filed an appeal, alleging that insufficient evidence existed to convict her of murder. The appeal sought either an acquittal, or a reduction in charge to criminally negligent homicide with a new hearing for sentencing on the reduced charge. On August 5, 2021, the Fifth Court of Appeals of Texas upheld Guyger's murder conviction, unanimously holding that the jury verdict was reasonable and Guyger's own testimony supported the murder charge. On November 17 of that year, the Fifth Court of Appeals again upheld her murder conviction using similar reasoning, stating that her defense that she had unknowingly entered the wrong apartment did not justify the lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide. Her appeal to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the court of last resort for criminal cases in the state, was denied.
Guyger is currently imprisoned in the Mountain View Correctional Center. She will be eligible for release as early as September 2024, although her full sentence runs until September 2029.
Controversies involving witnesses
On January 31, 2019, '' ABC News'' reported that a female witness—identified only as "Bunny"—had taken a video of Guyger's actions immediately after the shooting. The witness claimed to have been harassed and threatened by unidentified Internet troll
In slang, a troll is a person who posts or makes inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages online (such as in social media, a newsgroup, a forum, a chat room, a online video game), or in real life, with the int ...
s after providing the video to the Dallas County District Attorney's Office and later posting it on social media.
On October 4, 2019, key prosecution witness and Jean's across-the-hall neighbor, Joshua Brown, was shot and killed in the parking lot of another apartment complex he had moved to, about from where Jean and Guyger had lived. Witnesses could not describe the shooter or shooters, only the vehicle they drove. On October 8, Dallas police announced that they had identified three suspects in Brown's killing and had arrested one of them, and that the suspects were engaged in a drug deal with Brown when he was shot. A search of Brown's apartment yielded of marijuana
Cannabis, also known as marijuana among other names, is a psychoactive drug from the cannabis plant. Native to Central or South Asia, the cannabis plant has been used as a drug for both recreational and entheogenic purposes and in various tra ...
, of THC cartridges and $4,000 in cash; however, advocates questioned police claims that the three men had traveled from Alexandria, Louisiana, to purchase drugs from Brown, and an attorney representing Brown's family called for an independent investigation by another agency. Dallas Assistant Police Chief Avery Brown denied that Joshua Brown's death was related to Guyger's trial. A second suspect was arrested the next day, and on December 8, all three men were indicted on charges of capital murder
Capital murder was a statutory offence of aggravated murder in Great Britain, and Northern Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland, which was later adopted as a legal provision to define certain forms of aggravated murder in the United States. In som ...
, although one of them remained at large.
Memorials
On January 13, 2021, the Dallas City Council unanimously voted to rename approximately of South Lamar Street from Interstate 30 to South Central Expressway (S.M. Wright Freeway) as Botham Jean Boulevard. The street passes Jean's former apartment and Dallas police headquarters.
See also
*
* List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States, September 2018
* Shooting of Atatiana Jefferson
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jean, Botham
2018 controversies in the United States
2018 crimes in Texas
2018 deaths
2018 murders in the United States
2010s in Dallas
2018 in Texas
Jean, Botham
Dallas Police Department
Murder in Dallas
African Americans shot dead by law enforcement officers in the United States
September 2018 events in the United States
Trials in the United States
Murders by law enforcement officers in the United States