Ten days separated two North Texas watershed moments in 2019 for law enforcement and the Black community.

On Oct. 2, 2019, white Dallas police officer Amber Guyger was sentenced to 10 years for murdering Botham Jean, an innocent Black man, inside his apartment while she was off-duty but still in uniform. Then, on Oct. 12, white Fort Worth officer Aaron Dean shot and killed 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson through a window at her mother’s home.

Dean will face a jury Monday in Tarrant County — a long-awaited murder trial to determine whether he was justified as a peace officer to shoot Jefferson. The case sent shockwaves of grief and anger nationwide in a preview of 2020′s widespread social justice protests.

Dallas Rev. Peter Johnson recalled the sadness that washed over him when a Fort Worth pastor called with the disturbing news of Jefferson’s death. For many, he said, her death overshadowed a sigh of relief after Guyger’s murder conviction.

“When will it end?” Johnson remembered thinking, emotion overpowering him. It’s a question he still ponders.

A civil rights activist, 77-year-old Johnson has lived through repeated grave injustices by police against people of color. He worked for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at voter drives in the South and marched with him in the bloody 1965 Alabama protest from Selma to Montgomery. He remembers an era when a police officer like Guyger or Dean would have never faced murder charges — let alone be convicted and sentenced for killing a Black person.

“I don’t know if I have any real hope,” Johnson said, sitting inside his Dallas office. “I have to face the reality and the patterns that exist, and the patterns tell me that justice is not something to expect, unfortunately.”

Less than 2% of officers who shoot and kill someone on-duty face homicide charges, said Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who created one of the first national databases to track police violence. Stinson said in the majority of killings by police, prosecutors decline to bring criminal charges against an officer because they decide deadly force was legally justified.

Law enforcement officers kill more than 1,000 people while on duty each year across the U.S. Between 2005 and June of this year, 168 officers were arrested on charges of murder or manslaughter in on-duty killings, according to Stinson’s data.

But only 52 have been convicted of a crime, and just seven were found guilty of murder nationwide during the same time period. When an officer is convicted, it is often for a lesser offense such as manslaughter, Stinson said, and the average length of time an officer was sentenced to prison for murder was 18 years.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled use-of-force should be judged “from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” Lawyers and academics say the standard gives officers justification for racial bias.

Max Geron, retired Rockwall police chief, said officers must consider a continuum of use-of-force tactics — from physicality, less-lethal weapons to deadly force — while mitigating the risks to themselves and others.

“When officers do wrong, they have to be held accountable — it’s necessary to uphold community trust,” Geron said. “If the community doesn’t trust officers, any public officials … then that system breaks down.”

Johnson said Dean had no justifiable reason for shooting inside the window that separated him from Jefferson. The case, he said, is another example of racial bias and policing — not protecting.

“I just will go to my grave believing she’s dead because of the color of her skin,” Johnson said.

Shot through a window

Jefferson had recently moved into her ailing mother’s home to care of her and Jefferson’s then-8-year-old nephew Zion. Zion, interviewed by officers the same night, said Jefferson heard someone outside and pointed a handgun to the window, Fort Worth police said.

A neighbor called police after he noticed the front door of the house in the 1200 block of East Allen Avenue was open and the lights were on about 2:30 a.m. Jefferson and Zion were up late playing video games.

Dean and another officer opened a fence to walk around the back of the house, according to a lawsuit filed on Zion’s behalf.

Footage from Dean’s body camera shows him walk to the back of the house, then turn toward a window. He yelled at Jefferson — “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” — then shot her through the window in seconds.

Fort Worth police have said Dean didn’t identify himself as an officer when he arrived at the house in the predominantly Black neighborhood.

Dean was arrested on a murder charge two days after the shooting. Then-interim Fort Worth police chief Ed Kraus said Dean resigned before the chief could fire him. Kraus and former Mayor Betsy Price have said Jefferson was within her legal right to defend herself.

A gag order prohibits Dean, his defense lawyers, Jefferson’s family and prosecutors from speaking until after the trial. Dean’s lead defense attorney, Jim Lane, died on the eve of jury selection. Dean’s trial was delayed multiple times, once in part because of Lane’s poor health and when defense attorneys petitioned to have the trial moved out of Tarrant County. A previous judge ordered Dean’s other attorneys to continue the case while Lane was ill and the current judge did not delay the trial after Lane’s death.

Neither of Jefferson’s parents are alive to see the trial. Her father, Marquis Jefferson, and mother, Yolanda Carr, died within three months of her killing. Jefferson is survived by two sisters and a brother. She graduated in 2014 from Xavier University of Louisiana, a historically Black Catholic college in New Orleans.

Amber Carr described her sister in the days following the shooting as a doting aunt to her nephews.

Jefferson was simply enjoying life in her home the night she was killed, “where no one would have expected her life to be in harm’s way, especially not at the hands of a civil servant who had taken the oath to serve and protect,” sister Ashley Carr said in 2019.

Ashley Carr asked officials at the time to follow the example of her sister’s character, to “be honorable when it comes to narrating the memory of this beautiful soul.”

At vigils following the shooting, crowds chanted, “No justice, no peace.” Condemnation of police and calls for accountability over Jefferson’s death foreshadowed the sweeping 2020 social justice protests in response to the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis officer.

Wide latitude for deadly force

Although use of force laws and policies vary across states and law enforcement agencies, officers are generally afforded a wide latitude for determining when deadly force is OK.

Force “becomes necessary and is permitted under specific circumstances, such as in self-defense or in defense of another individual or group,” according to the National Institute of Justice.

Geron said like citizens, officers deserve to be treated fairly under the law.

“I want to stress that these incidents are understandably inflammatory to the citizens that want to be treated fairly and feel safe in their homes,” he said, “but at the end of the day the officers involved absolutely deserve due process.”

Civil rights lawyer David Henderson, who represents Jefferson’s nephew in a federal civil lawsuit, said he fears the jury — in the more conservative Tarrant County — will empathize with Dean. He anticipates Dean’s lawyers will argue he did not intend to kill Jefferson. The jury was chosen Friday. None of the jurors are Black, but some are people of color.

If convicted, Dean faces up to life in prison. Before his arrest, no Tarrant County officer had ever faced a murder charge, the district attorney’s office said at the time. Prosecutors pursued lesser charges of criminally negligent homicide against some Tarrant County officers.

“Out of all the cases that have been tried recently, this one makes me the most nervous,” Henderson said. “I think there’s the highest likelihood that he could be acquitted out of the other cases that have gone to trial.”

Tarrant County juries and grand juries have found officers were justified in recent shooting deaths.

A Tarrant County grand jury declined to indict Arlington officer Craig Roper in the shooting death of Tavis Crane, 23, during a traffic stop. Police said Crane ran over an officer but his family disputes the department’s account. In 2019, a civil lawsuit was filed accusing Craig Roper of using excessive force against Crane. The civil case is still pending. As of October, Roper was still with the department.

Earlier this year, ex-Arlington officer Ravinder Singh was acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Margarita “Maggie” Brooks. Singh said he was aiming at Brooks’ dog, which had charged at the officer, when he shot her in the chest.

In 2019, Arlington officer Bau Tran was indicted for criminally negligent homicide in connection with the fatal shooting of 24-year-old O’Shae Terry who drove away during a traffic stop. That case is still pending.

In neighboring Dallas County, several officers have faced murder charges for their actions both on- and off-duty in recent years.

Jurors heard from Guyger in her murder trial before deciding her prison sentence. Guyger said she believed she was entering her apartment on the third floor of the Southside Flats Apartments when she got home from her shift the night of Sept. 6, 2021. Guyger, who is white, said she shot to kill Jean because she thought he was an intruder. Guyger was instead on the wrong floor and entered Jean’s apartment, which was directly above hers. Jean, a 26-year-old accountant, was eating ice cream on the couch just before he got up when Guyger entered.

In 2018, former Balch Springs officer Roy Oliver was convicted of murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison for the on-duty killing of Jordan Edwards, 15, who had done nothing wrong and was unarmed as he left a party. Oliver murdered Jordan as the teen was sitting in the passenger seat of a car driving away.

Also in 2018, Farmers Branch police officer Ken Johnson was convicted of murder and felony aggravated assault for killing 16-year-old Jose Cruz and seriously wounding another teen while off-duty. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Cruz and the other teen were stealing a seat out of the officer’s vehicle when Johnson shot them.

In 2019, another Farmers Branch officer, Michael Dunn, was indicted for murder in the on-duty shooting death of 35-year-old Juan “Johnny” Moreno. Moreno was parked in a pickup, which had been reported stolen in Irving, when two officers approached the vehicle. As Moreno pulled away, he was shot and later died at a hospital. That case is pending.

Henderson said Jefferson’s killing has dropped off the larger public’s radar.

“It should be the most important out of all the cases that have come out of the metroplex, perhaps the most important out of all the cases nationwide,” he said, “because [police are] supposed to protect and to serve and that’s what they were called to do.”

“And they could not have failed more substantially in fulfilling that mission.”