Former Fort Worth cop who shot Atatiana Jefferson in her home sentenced to nearly 12 years

Aaron Dean, the former Fort Worth, Tex., cop who shot Atatiana Jefferson through her bedroom window in 2019, was sentenced Tuesday to nearly 12 years in prison.

The jury opted to charge Dean, who is white, with manslaughter for killing Jefferson, who is Black, instead of homicide. The latter charge would have brought up to 20 years behind bars.

The verdict, reached last week, marked one of the rare times an officer has been convicted for killing someone who was also armed. The sentence came to 11 years and 10 monhts.

Jefferson, 28, was playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew on the night of Oct. 12, 2019, when she grabbed her legally owned gun upon hearing what she thought was an intruder out back.

The person lurking in the backyard was Dean, 38, who was responding to a neighbor’s non-emergency call about an open front door. According to body camera footage, neither he nor a second officer on the scene identified themselves as police.

From the backyard, Dean, his gun already drawn, shouted at Jefferson to show her hands, then felled her with a single shot through the window a split second later, before she could comply.

He testified that Jefferson had pointed a gun at him, but partner Officer Carol Darch said in court that Dean had never mentioned seeing a gun that night. He acknowledged in testimony that he had mentioned the gun but only after he’d seen it on the floor inside the house. He also admitted that he had not given Jefferson first aid.

Dean, who’d been fresh out of the police academy a year earlier, quit the force soon after the incident and before being charged.

The door was open, it emerged later at trial, because the nephew had burned some burgers, and the house was being aired out.

The incident came on the heels of numerous other incidents of white police officers killing Black people, drawing outrage over what attorney Lee Merritt called the unwarranted slaying of yet another law-abiding citizen in their own home.

Jefferson’s grieving father, Marquis Jefferson, died on November 10 of a heart attack at age 58. Her mother, Yolanda Carr, died a few months later, in January 2020.

The trial had been postponed numerous times by issues from attorney wrangling to the COVID pandemic.

With News Wire Services