‘No Excuse’: Fellow Officers Condemn Police Shooting of Fort Worth Woman

 Atatiana Jefferson pointed a gun at her window before being shot from outside by a police officer, her young nephew said. But the police chief said she was entitled to defend herself.

FORT WORTH — When James Smith called a nonemergency police number at 2:23 a.m. on Saturday, he opened with a note of concern: “I’m calling about my neighbor.” He had noticed that his neighbor’s doors were open, the lights on in the middle of the night, and he was worried. “It’s not normal for them,” he said.

But when the information was relayed to two police officers who responded, it was classified as an “open structure” call, a vague term that can mean anything from an abandoned house to a burglary. The officers parked about a block away, spoke in low voices as they crept through the yard and did not knock on the door to announce themselves as the police.

This sequence of events, explained in more detail on Tuesday, offered one potential explanation of what happened in the confusing moments before a white Fort Worth police officer abruptly shot through a bedroom window on Saturday and killed the 28-year-old black woman who lived inside. But exactly what the officer saw when he fired the single fatal shot was still in question, even as officials condemned his actions as inexcusable and pursued a rare murder charge against a police officer. 

The woman, Atatiana Jefferson, had been up late playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew when she heard noises outside. Her nephew told the authorities that she had pulled a handgun from her purse and pointed it at the window, according to an arrest warrant released on Tuesday.

Ms. Jefferson had been up late playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew on Saturday when she was shot.

But it was unclear what the officer, Aaron Y. Dean, saw when he looked into the window, which was obscured by the reflection of his flashlight on the glass, at least according to the body camera video released by the police. Mr. Dean has declined to give an interview to investigators, according to the arrest warrant, and his partner on the call said that she saw only Ms. Jefferson’s face in the window at the time of the shooting.

Mr. Dean, 34, resigned from the department on Monday and was arrested later that day. He was charged with murder. Prosecutors will present the evidence to a grand jury, which will decide whether or not to issue an indictment.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Ms. Jefferson’s brother, Adarius Carr, said the problems in the Fort Worth Police Department extended beyond the actions of a single officer.

“This rookie cop is not going to be the scapegoat for what happened,” he said. “Yes, he is going to take his punishment, but the system failed him. Whoever senior who was with him failed him. Whoever sent him out failed him. The training failed him. There is a lot that has to get fixed.”

Community leaders have complained that the shooting exacerbated a mistrust of the police department, particularly among black residents. Six people, of various races, have died in police shootings in Fort Worth since June.

Mr. Dean graduated from the police academy in March 2018, according to state records. He joined the Fort Worth Police Department the next month. He had previously taken classes at the University of Texas at Arlington, chipping away at his degree from the spring of 2003 through the spring of 2011. He graduated with a degree in physics, a university spokesman said.

A lawyer for Mr. Dean could not be reached on Tuesday.

He appeared to live with relatives in nearby Arlington, on a quiet street of tan-brick houses about 12 miles east of where Ms. Jefferson was shot. No one answered the door at the Dean family residence, a low-slung home with a neatly trimmed lawn. Officers with the Arlington Police Department kept watch on the house throughout the afternoon.

Manny Ramirez, the president of the Fort Worth Police Officers Association, said that police officers approach open structure calls prepared for any number of situations: a burglar in the house, doors left open by residents, abandonment. Still, Officer Ramirez said that everyone he had spoken to within the department was dumbfounded as to why Mr. Dean opened fire.

“He’s such a young officer, not in age, but just young in tenure,” Officer Ramirez said. “It’s one of those things where we’re all at a loss and there’s no way to explain it. We can’t understand how this happened.”

Mr. Smith, the neighbor who called the police early on Saturday, was distraught after learning that Ms. Jefferson had been killed. “I’m shaken. I’m mad. I’m upset. And I feel it’s partly my fault,” he told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram later that day. “If I had never dialed the police department, she’d still be alive.”

At a news conference on Tuesday, Ed Kraus, the interim police chief, said that the department was investigating how information about the neighbor’s call was relayed to the responding officers.

“The information came from the neighbor to the call-takers and while it was relayed to the dispatch, it was determined to be an open structure call,” Chief Kraus said, adding that officers probably would have acted differently if they believed they were called to simply check on the well-being of a family.

Police response protocols vary, but Officer Steve Grammas, the president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association, said that in most cases a call from someone concerned about a neighbor not answering the phone would most likely result in a door-knock from officers. If someone called about two doors open in the middle of the night, however, officers might immediately consider that the house was being burglarized, Officer Grammas said.

“It’s definitely more than just, ‘I’ll go see if the homeowners are O.K.,” he said. “You’re thinking maybe a break-in, maybe worse.” The calls that result in an open structure dispatch may sound similar to those that result in a welfare check, but the classification matters, Officer Grammas said. “They’re two different frames of mind for the officer,” he said.

Chief Kraus said he could not speculate on Mr. Dean’s mind-set at the time of the shooting, and a police spokesman declined to comment on whether Ms. Jefferson was holding the gun, as her young nephew told the police, or had anything else in her hands at the moment she was shot.

This Monday, Oct. 14, 2019 photo shows the window, far left, through which she was shot.CreditDavid Kent/Associated Press

 

Chief Kraus has defended Ms. Jefferson’s right to have a gun in her own home and said there was “no excuse” for Mr. Dean’s response.

He grew emotional on Tuesday as he described the reaction from other officers in the department, who he said had overwhelmingly thanked him for taking action against Mr. Dean. He praised officers who he said worked hard to build relationships in the community — and would have to pay the price in lost trust.

“I likened it to a bunch of ants building an ant hill, and somebody comes with a hose and washes it away,” he said. “They just have to start from scratch.”