By Harriet Ramos
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
FORT WORTH, Texas — As the murder trial of former Fort Worth police officer Aaron Dean entered its fourth day Monday, Dean took the witness stand to testify in his defense and faced tough questions from the prosecution.
Monday morning was Dean’s first time to speak publicly about the case.
“Because this jury needs to hear from me and hear the truth,” Dean said at the start of his testimony.
Dean recounted the early morning hours of Oct. 12, 2019, and the call that took him to the home on East Allen Avenue where he shot Atatiana Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman, through her bedroom window around 2:30 a.m. Dean and another officer, Carol Darch, were responding to a neighbor’s call about open doors at the house.
It was dark on the street, Dean said. He and Darch went to the wrong house first and had to go back to one of the police cars and get the correct address.
Dean said they could see the front door of the house was open, though the glass storm door was closed. He doesn’t remember hearing anything and said he didn’t see signs of forced entry.
According to Dean, cupboards and drawers were open and items were “just strewn about inside” the house. It looked to him like someone had gone through the house looking for valuables, he testified.
Dean said he was thinking “that we had a possible burglary at that time.”
While looking inside, Dean switched on his body camera. Darch wasn’t wearing a bodycam. She said when she testified Tuesday, on the second day of the trial, that she had reported her camera missing and was waiting for a new one to be issued.
When they got around to the side door, Dean testified, there was a screwdriver near the base of the door, which he thought could have been used in a burglary attempt, and lawn equipment on the ground. He said what he saw there reinforced the officers’ mistaken perception that they were dealing with a burglary in progress.
When they entered the back yard, Dean said, he went to check the bedroom window. The screen looked intact. He said he looked down to check for pry marks.
“As I looked through that window,” Dean said, “low in the window I saw a person.”
Dean said he just saw a torso and “the upper arms were moving” like someone was reaching for something. Dean couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman or what race the person was, he testified.
“I thought we had a burglar, so I stepped back, straightened up and drew my weapon and then pointed it towards the figure,” Dean said. “I couldn’t see that person’s hands.”
Dean, who did not identify himself as a police officer, shouted, “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!”
“I needed to see that person’s hands because the hands carry weapons, the hands are the threat to us,” Dean testified.
“As I started to get that second phrase out, ‘Show me your hands,’ I saw the silhouette ... I was looking right down the barrel of a gun,” Dean said. “When I saw the barrel of that gun pointed at me, I fired a single shot from my duty weapon.”
The light mounted on his gun shone in his face when the gun recoiled, Dean said, but when his vision cleared he saw a person.
Dean said he saw Jefferson fall and heard her scream.
“I knew that I had shot that person,” Dean said, his voice breaking.
Dean said he looked inside the window and saw Jefferson on the floor. He testified that he tried to open the window to get inside, but it wouldn’t open. He and Darch ran into the house through the front door.
When they entered the back room where Jefferson lay face-down on the floor, Dean said, he found Jefferson’s handgun near her feet. He put on his gloves and picked up the gun, saying he had been trained to move a weapon away from a person “prior to doing anything else.”
When prosecutor Dale Smith asked Dean how long it took him to start CPR, Dean at first said, “I don’t recall.” When questioned again he said, “it was a while,” before finally admitting he never started CPR on Jefferson.
Smith pointed out that the body-camera video shows Dean did not do anything to help Jefferson for a full minute after entering her bedroom.
“A full minute she lay there bleeding, at your hands, without you doing anything to try to save her life?” Smith asked.
“If that’s what the clock says,” Dean said.
Later, on redirect by the defense, Dean said he didn’t realize how much time had passed until he watched the video with his attorneys.
Dean testified that he had lost his medical kit a few days earlier and that he rolled Jefferson over and pressed an afghan against her chest wound to try to stop the bleeding. Other police officers arrived shortly thereafter and Dean was taken out of the room.
Darch took Jefferson’s 8-year-old nephew Zion Carr outside while Dean stayed in the room. Zion was in the bedroom playing video games with his aunt at the time of the shooting and was the only witness inside the house. He has said Jefferson heard noises in their back yard, grabbed her handgun from her purse and looked out the window. Last week, he testified that Jefferson held the gun down by her side. In an interview hours after the shooting, Zion said his aunt pointed the gun at the window.
When the officers went in the room, Dean said, “To my right, I see a kid,” and “I’m thinking who brings a kid to a burglary? What’s going on?”
Dean said he was put into a police car with another officer. He said that is standard procedure after an officer is involved in a shooting and is part of caring for the mental health of the officer.
“It’s a traumatic event, shooting someone,” Dean said, his voice breaking with apparent emotion.
‘I did a fine job’
Smith cross-examined Dean at length and reviewed the body-camera video with him. Dean seemed flustered and sometimes paused for a long time while answering the questions.
Smith repeatedly asked Dean about the decisions he made on the call such as not knocking or the door or identifying himself as a police officer, not guarding the doors to the house, and not calling for backup if he thought a burglary was in progress.
“Is that good police work?” Smith asked over and over again.
Dean frequently answered “no,” but kept insisting he was focused on inspecting the structure.
According to Smith, just one minute and 17 seconds passed between the time Dean turned on his body camera and the time he shot Jefferson.
When Smith asked what kind of a grade Dean would give himself for that first minute and 17 seconds before the shooting, Dean acknowledged he could have done some things better, but said he would give himself a B and later said he thinks “I did a fine job.”
Under Smith’s cross-examination, Dean insisted that identifying yourself as a police officer is against policy on an open structure call, and that he would have been reprimanded by a police sergeant if he had done it. He indicated he had never identified himself as a police officer while on an open structure call.
At one point, Smith approached Dean with call records of other open structure and burglary calls where he had identified himself as a Fort Worth police officer. Dean acknowledged he remembered one call and that he had identified himself on that occasion.
“Every call is different, but yes, there have been some,” Dean admitted.
“If you had announced yourself, Atatiana Jefferson would still be alive?” Smith asked earlier in the cross-examination.
“I don’t know,” Dean responded, adding that depended on whether she would have come out of the house and pointed a gun at him.
Smith asked if Dean intended for “the person on the other end of that bullet to die?” Dean said, “I intended to stop the threat” and said he knew it was a possibility the person would die.
The defense is trying to prove that Dean saw Jefferson point a gun at him through the window and that he shot her in self-defense. The prosecution has presented evidence that Dean never said he saw a gun.
Smith questioned why Dean didn’t tell Darch he had seen a gun if he believed they might be in danger when they entered the house. Dean said he didn’t tell Darch about the gun until he found it at Jefferson’s feet.
“You didn’t seem too concerned for her (Darch’s) safety, if in your mind there’s burglars in that house with guns,” Smith said.
Smith also questioned why the officers said they didn’t knock on the door because they didn’t want to give away their position, but they turned on flashlights and walked in front of doors and windows that police would consider “a fatal funnel,” exposing them to any threat that might be inside the house.
The neighbor who made the call, James Smith, and three members of his family were watching from their porch across the street, but Dean said he didn’t notice them.
Dean said more than once, “I was as apprehensive and cautious as I was about every call.”
Dean had been patrolling on his own for about a year before the October 2019 shooting.
When he entered the room, Dean testified, he found Jefferson’s gun, which had a green laser sight that was turned on. Dean did not mention seeing the green light through the window.
In the room, Dean testified, “I saw the green laser and you hear me go ‘phew’ because at that moment I’m thinking that’s how close we came to dying.” Prosecutors have argued Dean had not previously seen the gun and seemed relieved to find it.
Asked by Smith if he had a choice to do anything differently, Dean said, “I suppose we could have just stayed home but, no.”
Smith asked if that was a joke and Dean said no. Asked by the prosecutor, Dean acknowledged that a person’s home should be a safe place and that there’s nothing wrong with a resident having a gun to protect their home.
Smith asked Dean if one of his loved ones were home alone with a child and heard noises and saw flashlights outside, would he want that person to go to the window with a gun? Dean answered, “Maybe.”
Dean did not give a statement to police after the shooting. He resigned two days later and was arrested later that night.
Forensics expert
Dean said that the video recorded by the body camera on his shoulder didn’t show everything he could see with his eyes.
Dean’s testimony concluded around 2 p.m. and Grant Fredericks, a forensics video expert, testified about the capabilities of the type of body camera used by the Fort Worth Police Department.
Fredericks said video evidence needs to be “interrogated” like a human eyewitness to determine its accuracy. The goal is to provide a visual and audio perspective of everything that happens in front of the camera, but there are limitations and a body camera can’t exactly reproduce a police officer’s experience or perspective, Fredericks said.
The body camera has a single perspective lens, compared to the two eyes of a person. A camera may misinterpret some details and has a narrow field of view, the witness said.
“So we’re kind of hamstrung on what we see,” Fredericks said.
Fredericks took the jury through the images of Dean’s body-camera footage and analyzed both the video and audio from the night of the shooting.
At the point where Dean was outside Jefferson’s window, Fredericks said he could see Jefferson’s hand outstretched and a dark object in her hand. He said he couldn’t identify the object, but said it was at the extension of that hand.
The trial will resume Tuesday with more of the defense case.
The prosecution rested its case on Wednesday after about two-and-a-half days of testimony last week, surprising many observers in the community. Some questioned at that point whether prosecutors had done enough to present a strong case against Dean.
The prosecution could still call its own expert witnesses this week as a rebuttal to the defense witnesses’ testimony.
Dean was indicted on a murder charge but jurors likely will be able to consider lesser charges such as manslaughter. A murder conviction carries a sentence of five years to life.
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