Officer Gets Nearly 12 Years for Killing Atatiana Jefferson

The Associated Press
By The Associated Press
December 21, 2022US News
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Officer Gets Nearly 12 Years for Killing Atatiana Jefferson
Aaron Dean waits for his sentence to be delivered at Tarrant County's 396th District Court at the Tim Curry Criminal Justice Center in Fort Worth, Texas, on Dec. 20, 2022. (Amanda McCoy/Star-Telegram via AP, Pool)

A former Texas police officer who fatally shot Atatiana Jefferson through a rear window of her home in 2019 was sentenced Tuesday to nearly 12 years in prison for his manslaughter conviction.

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 Thursday also determined the sentence—11 years, 10 months, and 12 days.

The Fort Worth officer shot the 28-year-old woman 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 Jefferson was armed. Dean testified that he saw her weapon; prosecutors claimed the evidence showed otherwise.

Dean shot Jefferson on Oct. 12, 2019, after a neighbor called a nonemergency police line to report that the front door to Jefferson’s home was open. She had been playing video games that night with her 8-year-old nephew, Zion Carr, and it emerged at trial that they left the doors open to vent smoke from hamburgers the boy burnt. Zion, now 11, was in the room with his aunt when she was shot and testified during the trial.

Atatiana Koquice Jefferson
Atatiana Koquice Jefferson. (Courtesy of Lee Merritt)

After the sentence was pronounced, one of Jefferson’s sisters, Ashley Carr, read statements in court from herself and another sister, Amber Carr, who is Zion’s mother.

Amber Carr, said Jefferson, who planned to go to medical school, “had big dreams and goals” and that her son “feels he is responsible to fill the whole role of his aunt, and he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.”

Ashley Carr called her sister “a beautiful ray of sunshine.”

“She was in her home, which should have been the safest place for her to be, and yet turned out to be the most dangerous,” she said.

Attorneys for Dean did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press following the sentencing.

Dean testified that he had no choice when he saw 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.”

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 didn’t 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 Jefferson first aid.

Zion testified that Jefferson took out her gun believing there was an intruder in the backyard, but he offered contradictory accounts of whether she pointed the pistol out the window. On the trial’s opening day, he testified that Jefferson always had the gun pointed down, but in an interview that was recorded soon after the shooting and played in court, Zion said she had pointed the weapon at the window.

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