Recap: Watch Day 2 of Aaron Dean murder trial in Atatiana Jefferson shooting

The murder trial of former Fort Worth police officer Aaron Dean enters its second day on Tuesday.

Watch live video from today’s proceedings below.

Dean is on trial in the death of Atatiana Jefferson, 28, who he shot through a window at her home. Dean and another officer had walked into the back yard while responding to a neighbor’s call about open doors at the house on East Allen Avenue about 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 12, 2019.

On Monday, attorneys gave their opening statements and the first witness, Jefferson’s 11-year-old nephew Zion Carr, testified about witnessing the shooting. He and his aunt were playing video games in her bedroom when she heard noises outside, grabbed her handgun from her purse and looked out the window, Zion testified.

Dean’s attorneys told the jury that the evidence will show the officer saw Jefferson point a gun at him through the window and he acted in self-defense. The prosecution said Dean never said that he saw a gun, did not identify himself as an officer, and didn’t give Jefferson time to respond to his command to put her hands up before he shot her.

Video of nephew’s interview

The trial resumed Tuesday morning with attorneys playing video of Zion’s interview with an Alliance for Children employee who specializes in questioning children. The interview was recorded about two hours after the shooting. Zion was 8 years old at the time.

The video highlighted some differences between Zion’s testimony Monday and what he said on the night of the shooting.

In the original interview, Zion said he saw his aunt point her handgun toward the window and that he saw the officer’s gun, badge and flashlight out the window. He said he heard the officer yell “put your hands up.” He said his aunt didn’t put her hands up and the officer shot her. He spoke quietly in the video, and cried at times, so parts of what he said were difficult to hear.

On Monday, Zion testified that Jefferson held the gun down by her side and did not raise it and he said he didn’t see the police officers out the window.

Carol Darch testifies

Jurors heard several hours of testimony from the other officer who was on the scene, Carol Darch, who began testifying in the morning and continued after lunch.

Darch said Dean was the primary officer on the call and she responded to assist because two officers are required on open structure calls. She described her memories of the shooting and then the prosecution played Dean’s body-camera video and asked Darch to explain what was happening in the video.

Darch said she never saw Jefferson’s gun and never heard Dean say that he saw a gun. The video also shows Dean did not perform CPR or other live-saving measures to help Jefferson. Other officers did that when they arrived after the shooting.

Dean and Darch were searching the back yard at the time of the shooting. Darch said she had drawn her gun from its holster but did not have her finger on the trigger.

Darch said she had her back toward Dean, who was facing the house, and they were standing very close together. Darch heard Dean shout a command for Jefferson to put her hands up. Darch started to turn around and that’s when she heard the shot that Dean fired, she testified.

After she turned around, Darch said, all that she could see was a person in the window with eyes “as big as saucers.”

Dean asked Darch about whether she had a first-aid kit but he did not use it to help Jefferson, who could be heard crying and wailing after she was shot, according to the video. The video shows him searching the bedroom instead, and he seemed relieved when he found Jefferson’s gun on the floor, the prosecution contends.

Dean muted the auto on his bodycam at some point after he went into Jefferson’s room following the shooting, the video shows. Darch said she didn’t know whether someone told him to do that.

Darch took Zion outside the house while Dean stayed in the bedroom where Jefferson was lying on the floor, the video shows.

“As soon as I went in the door, I heard the baby and then that became my sole focus,” Darch said of Zion. She said she grabbed a blanket from the back of the couch to wrap him in and then took him outside to the curb “so he wouldn’t have to see what’s going on” while they waited for other officers to arrive.

Darch said she was most concerned about Zion. She became upset while talking about him on the witness stand and asked for a break to compose herself before the defense cross-examined her.

Darch testified that when the officers looked in the open front and side doors before going into the back yard, they thought that the house looked like it had been ransacked or burglarized. But they did not see any signs of forced entry on the doors, she said. They did not hear anything inside the house, according to Darch. They did not check to see whether the closed glass storm doors were locked and did not knock or announce themselves.

“If there’s still a burglar in the building, you don’t want them to know you’re there and escape,” Darch said.

In a photo of the inside of the house shown by the prosecution, three drawers or cabinets were open in the kitchen and some items were on the floor. Prosecutor Ashlea Deener pointed out there was an 8-year-old living in the home.

To Darch, “It looked like someone had methodically gone through that house looking for something,” she said.

Before they went in the back yard, the two officers looked inside the cars in the driveway to make sure no one was inside but did not run the license plate numbers to confirm the cars belonged to the residents, Darch said.

In cross-examination, the defense asked Darch about tunnel vision and what she referred to as “auditory exclusion,” meaning what a person sees and hears can be affected by stressful situations and adrenaline.

The defense asked Darch whether because of tunnel vision an officer might give commands focused on the threat he sees in front of him instead of what he’s been trained to say. Darch agreed with that statement.

“He’s vocalizing what he’s seeing and saying ‘show me your hands’ because that’s where the danger is coming from,” defense attorney Miles Brissette said.

The defense has said Dean saw Jefferson’s gun, with a green laser mounted on it, pointed directly at him.

After the lunch break, Brissette asked Darch about the uniform Dean was wearing and she noted his badge was silver and shiny. What he was wearing would have identified him as an officer, “As clear as I’m sitting here,” said Darch, who testified in uniform.

Brissette also asked about how officers are trained to react to deadly force such as a gun being pointed at them.

“Deadly force is always met with deadly force,” Darch said. “We’re trained to stop the threat.”

Brissette asked if Darch was surprised that Dean didn’t “carry on a conversation” after the shooting and said no and that “my primary focus was to get in” the house.

Darch also testified that she wasn’t surprised that other officers who responded to the scene asked Dean to move away and to give them Jefferson’s gun. The defense said the video shows Dean turn off the laser sight on Jefferson’s gun, clear the chamber and hand the gun and ammo to another officer.

Darch said she wasn’t surprised that Dean was taking deep breaths or short of breath “because of what we just went through.”

The defense asked Darch about whether the bodycam shows everything an officer sees.

“Your body camera rarely catches what your eyes can see,” Darch said.

Questioned further by the prosecutor, Darch said she couldn’t speak to what Dean or Jefferson saw.

Deener, the prosecutor, pointed out that the officers were wrong about the house having been burglarized. She also asked Darch to read the Fort Worth Police Department’s general orders about responding to an open structure call and noted that they didn’t follow them correctly. The officers didn’t guard the doors to make sure any potential intruder didn’t exit through them, Darch said.

The orders also say that if there no signs of forced entry, the officers are supposed to call the homeowner, according to what Darch read in court. Darch said the officers were still in the process of looking for signs of forced entry.

Earlier in her testimony, Darch spoke at length about the training process for officers, including learning CPR and other first aid and how to respond to different types of calls. She said she and Dean graduated from the academy at the same time in April 2018, after which they went through several months of field training.

After field training, Darch had been patrolling on her own for about a month before the shooting. She couldn’t remember if she had responded to any prior open structure or welfare check calls at that point, but she testified that she has responded to many since then and that the two types of calls are vastly different.

The call taker coded neighbor James Smith’s call to Jefferson’s home as an open structure. Nothing in the information given to the officers mentioned a welfare check, Darch said. On that type of call, someone notices a door open that shouldn’t be open at a business or residence and officers are called to check it out, Darch said. A welfare check often happens when a family member or neighbor hasn’t heard from a loved one and wants officers to check if that person is OK, she said.

Darch said that Fort Worth police officers considered the Hillside Morningside neighborhood where Jefferson lived, which she called Baker Division, to be part of a high-crime area.

Darch testified that she wasn’t wearing a body camera on the night of the shooting. She said she reported her camera missing after she had left it on a charging station.

Darch said she has previously watched the video from the bodycam Dean was wearing and verified its accuracy.

The attorneys have said the jurors will be able to watch Dean’s bodycam video as many times as they want before delivering their verdict. The prosecution has told the jurors to pay attention to what Dean does and doesn’t say on the video.

After the shooting, Darch testified, she walked through the yard with Fort Worth Major Case detectives who were investigating the use of force and she pointed out where she and Dean had each been standing. She was taken later that morning to the Major Case unit’s offices to be interviewed.

Call-taker testifies

Abriel Talbert, who answered neighbor James Smith’s call to the police non-emergency line, testified after Darch.

She said regardless of whether the call comes in through 911 or the non-emergency line, she was trained to classify the call based on the details given. She said she listed the call as an open structure because Smith said his neighbor’s door was open, which “was pretty black and white” as an example of an open structure.

Talbert said she would ask questions of callers to get details and let officers know what to expect.

Talbert said she included in her notes that the residents’ cars were in the driveway to show there was “nothing out of the ordinary other than open doors.” She also noted that the residents were usually there at that time of night, so that the officers would know somebody might be home.

A call taker speaks to the public and then sends the information to a dispatcher, who sends officers to the location, Talbert said.

Officers can send messages to the call center or dispatcher if they need additional information or need to get in touch with a homeowner or the person who called in the complaint, she said.

James Smith

Neighbor James Smith was the last witness on Tuesday and the prosecution played the audio of his call to the police line.

Smith said he became concerned after his sister, who lives next door to him, told him that doors were open at Jefferson’s house across the street. He said he walked across the street to the driveway but couldn’t see anyone in the house.

He said he was concerned about the front door being open because he’d never seen the family use that door. Zion testified Monday that he had burned hamburgers and opened the door to let smoke out.

Smith said he called the non-emergency number because, “I didn’t know what was going on.” He said he didn’t knock on the door because it was 2 a.m. and he didn’t want to startle his neighbors. Atatiana’s mother, Yolanda Carr, had been in poor health and in and out of the hospital, where she was on the night of the shooting.

Smith said he didn’t know the statistics on crime in the area but that he had felt safe enough in the neighborhood where he has lived for about 60 years that he didn’t lock his doors until after the 2019 shooting.

Smith said the shooting “was devastating” and he’s lived with it every day since.

The trial is expected to last about two weeks.