‘I shot an innocent man,’ ex-officer who killed neighbour testifies in murder trial

A former Dallas police officer on trial for murder in the death of her unarmed neighbour testified Friday that she had been afraid for her life when she entered what she believed was her own apartment and saw a “silhouette figure” moving around inside.

“Let me see your hands,” the former officer, Amber R Guyger, shouted in the courtroom, recounting the chaotic moments when she pulled out her service weapon and fired at what she thought was an intruder.

She said she only later realised that she had actually gone to the wrong floor and shot her upstairs neighbour, Botham Shem Jean, a 26-year-old accountant who prosecutors said had been startled while watching television and eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream in his home.

“I shot an innocent man,” Guyger said during several hours of testimony Friday morning, during which she at times defended herself in a quiet voice and at others sobbed to the point where she could not speak clearly.

“I wish he was the one with the gun who killed me,” Guyger, 31, said. “I never wanted to take an innocent person’s life, and I’m so sorry.”

Friday’s testimony in front of a packed courtroom was the first time that jurors heard directly from Guyger in an unusual, high-profile case that is being closely watched against the backdrop of other police shootings in the United States.

The news in September 2018 that an off-duty white police officer had shot an unarmed black man in his home set off protests and heightened tensions in Dallas, and black activists, religious leaders and elected officials called on the authorities to prosecute her on substantial charges.

Many of Jean’s relatives have worn lapel pins in court, representing the island nation of St Lucia in the Caribbean, where Jean was from.

From the beginning, the questions in the case have centred not on whether Guyger shot Jean and caused his death, but on issues of perception and intent. At least one senior Texas law enforcement investigator has testified that the shooting was justified, based on Guyger’s claim that she believed she was confronting an intruder.

The trial has alternately cast Guyger as a tired but hardworking officer who mistakenly entered the wrong apartment and as a distracted, callous killer who made little effort to assist a dying young man she had just shot.

Guyger testified that she was returning home from a long day of work when she drove into the parking garage and talked on the phone with her police partner, Martin Rivera, with whom she was having a relationship. Prosecutors said she was still distracted by that conversation when she pulled into a parking spot on the wrong floor.

Jean lived in Unit 1478, and Guyger lived directly below him on the third floor in Unit 1378. As she walked down the fourth-floor hallway, she said, she did not encounter anyone or notice that anything was amiss.

Standing in front of the jury, Guyger pulled her backpack, lunchbox and heavy police vest onto her arm, just as she said she had done when carrying her gear in on the night of the shooting. She recalled how, in a matter of seconds, she put her key into the keyhole, noticed that the door was already ajar and heard someone moving around inside.

She pulled out her gun, she said, pushed the door open with her left arm and called on the person inside to show his hands. Jean started approaching her in a “fast-paced walk,” shouting “Hey, hey, hey,” according to her testimony.

She fired her weapon twice at Jean, striking him once in the torso.

“I was scared he was going to kill me,” she said.

Her account differed from the testimony of prosecution witnesses, who said that the trajectory of the bullet showed that Jean was either getting up from a seated position or was “in a cowering position” hiding behind a 3-foot wall inside his apartment when he was shot.

Dr Chester Gwin, a pathologist with the Dallas County medical examiner’s office, testified that the bullet that killed Jean travelled in a diagonal downward path through his body.

Three of Jean’s neighbours who live in the apartment complex testified that they did not hear Guyger give verbal commands for Jean to show his hands.

“I can’t say why” they did not hear anything, she said Friday.

“Because you didn’t say it,” said Jason Hermus, a prosecutor for the Dallas County district attorney’s office.

Prosecutors sought to cast doubt upon Guyger’s sincerity, questioning why she did not do more to help Jean after he was shot, and accusing her of being more concerned with her own well-being than with his.

Guyger said that she briefly tried to perform CPR and a sternum rub while waiting for paramedics, but prosecutors noted that she failed to use nearby supplies that could have stopped “traumatic bleeding.”

They also drew attention to her demeanour later in the night, when video from a police car showed Guyger sitting calm and collected, swiping through her phone while Jean’s body rolled by her on a stretcher.

And they pointed to text messages from two days after the shooting, when Guyger shared sexually explicit banter with Rivera and talked about drinking. While Jean’s family was mourning, the prosecution said, Guyger was flirting and discussing “getting drunk.”

A key moment for the defence unfolded earlier in the week, but not in the presence of the jury.

A Texas Ranger investigator, Sgt David Armstrong, said that Guyger would have had probable cause to shoot Jean, who she thought was an intruder.

When asked whether he believed that Guyger committed a crime, Armstrong testified, “Based on the totality of the circumstances, no.”

Seven of the 12 jurors and four alternates are African American, four are white and five are of other races and ethnicities. The jury, if it decides to convict, could find Guyger guilty of murder or of a lesser charge such as manslaughter.

© 2019 New York Times News Service