Fort Worth Police Shooting: Officer Is Charged With Murder for Killing Woman in Her Home

FORT WORTH — The former Fort Worth police officer who fatally shot a woman through her bedroom window this weekend was charged with murder on Monday and booked into jail, according to the Fort Worth Police Department.

The officer, Aaron Y. Dean, had resigned earlier on Monday, hours before the police chief had planned to fire him amid the community’s growing anger and frustration after the woman, Atatiana Jefferson, was killed while playing a video game with her 8-year-old nephew.

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Ed Kraus, the interim Fort Worth police chief, had said in an afternoon news conference that the department was conducting a criminal investigation into the officer’s actions and that he had reached out to the F.B.I. about the possibility of starting a civil rights investigation.

“I get it,” Chief Kraus said of the widespread public outrage that followed the release of body camera video showing that Ms. Jefferson had been given no warning that it was a police officer who had crept into her backyard, shined a light into her bedroom window and shouted, “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” immediately before firing a single fatal shot.

“Nobody looked at that video and said there was any doubt that this officer acted inappropriately,” the chief said.

S. Lee Merritt, a civil rights lawyer who is representing Ms. Jefferson’s family, said that the arrest came in response to national pressure over the case, but that broader cultural change was still needed in Fort Worth, where black residents have long complained of abuses at the hands of the police.

Since June, there have been six fatal shootings by police officers in Fort Worth.

“A murder charge and an arrest is a good start — it’s more than we are used to seeing,” Mr. Merritt said in an interview on Monday night. “The family is withholding their emotion until this officer is prosecuted properly.”

Mr. Dean, who is white, had been with the Fort Worth Police Department since April 2018, the chief said. He had graduated from the police academy a month earlier, according to documents provided by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, a state regulatory agency.

Ms. Jefferson, who is black, was killed after her house drew the attention of a neighbor, who called a nonemergency line at 2:23 a.m. Saturday because he was concerned that its front and side doors had been open for several hours. She died in her bedroom after officers tried to provide medical assistance, according to the Tarrant County medical examiner’s office.

“I can’t stop crying,” said Lillie Biggins, a longtime community leader in Fort Worth who had recently served on a race and culture task force for the city. “My heart is absolutely crushed.”

Michael Bell, the senior pastor at Greater St. Stephen First Church in Fort Worth, was among those who criticized the officers for not knocking on the door or otherwise identifying themselves to give Ms. Jefferson a chance to respond.

“They approached it as if it were a tactical exercise, even though it was a welfare check,” he said, adding that the latest shooting only added to distrust of the police in a community that had experienced a “cumulative effect” from multiple episodes of police force.

In 2009, a man with a history of mental illness died after he was Tasered by the Fort Worth police, which his family had called for help.

Several years later, in 2016, a mother called the police to report that a neighbor had choked her young son for littering, but the mother herself ended up getting arrested. In an encounter that was captured on video and widely shared, the mother, Jacqueline Craig, was forced to the ground and placed in handcuffs; her teenage daughters were also arrested.

Community members also cited the seven police shootings since early summer, six of them fatal, including the killing of a man who the police thought was carrying a rifle but was actually pointing a flashlight at officers after barricading himself inside a house.

“We’re beyond anger,” said the Rev. Kyev Tatum, a pastor at New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church in Fort Worth. “It’s trauma now. It’s unaddressed, toxic stress.”

In the controversy that followed the arrest of Ms. Craig and her daughters in 2016, the City Council appointed a task force to examine issues of race and culture in Fort Worth. The task force presented a series of recommendations last year, including an avenue to involve citizens in oversight of the Police Department and recommendations to diversify the police force.

The City Council in September authorized several of the task force recommendations, including a police monitor position, a police cadet program and the creation of a diversity and inclusion program.

Ms. Jefferson, 28, was killed weeks after the sentencing of Amber R. Guyger, a white former Dallas police officer who shot her unarmed black neighbor in his apartment last year and was sentenced to 10 years in prison this month. The case was one of a handful of police shootings to go to trial in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in recent years. In another case, a police officer shot an unarmed black 15-year-old as he sat in the passenger seat of a car; the officer was sentenced to 15 years in prison last year.

“Between these shootings and the trials of all of these different things, we literally have not had a chance to recover,” said Omar Suleiman, an imam and activist in the Dallas area. “There is just this deep anger and hurt in the streets that you can’t be safe in your apartment, you can’t be safe in your home, you can’t be safe in your car.”

Chief Kraus said he regretted that the Police Department had released photographs of a gun found on the floor below the window in Ms. Jefferson’s bedroom after she was killed — though he declined to say if she was holding it, or if the officer saw it before he shot her.

She had every right to have a gun in her bedroom, the chief said. “We’re homeowners in the state of Texas,” he said. “I can’t imagine most of us — if we thought we had somebody outside our house that shouldn’t be and we had access to a firearm — that we wouldn’t act very similarly to how she acted.”

Fort Worth is at least a 30-minute drive from Dallas and very much its own community, with its own local politics, cultural identity and history of relations with the police. But the two cities — flashy Dallas and down-home Fort Worth — are the anchors of a sprawling metroplex, where people commute from the smaller suburbs for work and meet in the middle for Dallas Cowboys games.

On Sunday, activists who only earlier this month stood outside the Dallas County courthouse to demand justice in the case against Ms. Guyger also came to Fort Worth for a vigil for Ms. Jefferson. “I saw many of the same faces,” Mr. Suleiman said.

Ms. Jefferson, who went by Tay, graduated in 2014 from Xavier University of Louisiana, the country’s only black Catholic college, with a degree in biology. She worked out of their modest, blue-paneled house in Fort Worth, selling medical equipment while she studied to apply to medical school.

After living in the Dallas area, she recently moved to Fort Worth to help care for her mother and her 8-year-old nephew, whom she had been showing how to mow and weed-whack the yard. He was in the room when his aunt was killed.

On Monday, the boy was playing along a sidewalk in downtown Dallas while his family held a news conference nearby. He wore a long-sleeve shirt with a BMX biker graphic and bluejeans, flexing his knowledge of sports cars, including a Corvette.

Ms. Jefferson’s mother, Yolanda, was missing from the family’s news conference. She had been in a hospital being treated for health issues when the police told her that an officer had shot her daughter, and that is where she remained on Monday.

“She feels helpless,” Ms. Carr said.

Marina Trahan Martinez reported from Fort Worth, and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Sarah Mervosh from New York. Dave Montgomery contributed reporting from Austin, Texas.