A former Texas police officer who fatally shot a woman through a rear window of her home in 2019 was sentenced on Tuesday to 11 years and 10 months in prison after being convicted of manslaughter.
Aaron Dean, 38, had faced up to 20 years in prison, but jurors also had the option of sentencing him to probation. The same jury that convicted him of manslaughter on Thursday also determined the sentence.
The white Fort Worth, Texas officer shot 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson, who was black, while responding to a call about an open front door. His guilty verdict was a rare conviction of an officer for killing someone who was also armed with a gun.
During the trial, the primary dispute was whether Dean knew Ms Jefferson was armed. Dean testified that he saw her weapon; prosecutors claimed the evidence showed otherwise.
Dean shot Ms Jefferson on October 12, 2019, after a neighbour called a non-emergency police line to report that the front door to Ms Jefferson’s home was open. She had been playing video games that night with her eight-year-old nephew and it emerged at the trial that they left the doors open to vent smoke from hamburgers the boy burned.
The case was unusual for the relative speed with which, amid public outrage, the Fort Worth Police Department released video of the shooting and arrested Dean. He had completed the police academy the year before and quit the force without speaking to investigators.
Since then, the case was repeatedly postponed because of the terminal illness of Dean’s lead lawyer and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Body camera footage showed that Dean and a second officer who responded to the call did not identify themselves as police at the house. Dean and Officer Carol Darch testified that they thought the house might have been burgled and quietly moved into the fenced-off backyard looking for signs of forced entry.
There, Dean, whose gun was drawn, fired a single shot through the window a split-second after shouting at Ms Jefferson, who was inside, to show her hands.
Dean testified that he had no choice when he saw Ms Jefferson pointing the barrel of a gun directly at him. But under questioning from prosecutors he acknowledged numerous errors, repeatedly conceding that actions he took before and after the shooting were “more bad police work”.
Officer Darch’s back was to the window when Dean shot, but she testified that he never mentioned seeing a gun before he pulled the trigger and did not say anything about the weapon as they rushed in to search the house.
Dean acknowledged on the witness stand that he said something about the gun only after seeing it on the floor inside the house and that he never gave Ms Jefferson first aid.
