Female police officer who shot black neighbour found guilty of murder

A jury has found a white female cop guilty of murder after she fatally shot her unarmed, black neighbour while “distracted” by sexually explicit texts.

Amber Guyger, a former Dallas police officer, has been found guilty of fatally shooting her unarmed male black neighbour and could be sentenced to 99 years in jail. Pic: AP

A white former Dallas police officer who said she fatally shot her unarmed, black neighbour after mistaking his apartment for her own has been found guilty of murder.

On Tuesday, a jury reached the verdict in Amber Guyger’s high-profile trial for the killing of Botham Jean after six days of witness testimony but just a few hours of deliberation.

Cheers erupted in the courthouse as the verdict was announced, and someone yelled “Thank you, Jesus!”

When the prosecutors walked into the hall, they broke into cheers.

Guyger sat alone, weeping, at the defence table.

In Texas, the sentence for murder is from five to 99 years in prison. The jury is expected to return on Tuesday afternoon for the punishment phase of the trial.

The basic facts of the unusual shooting were not in dispute throughout the trial.

Guyger becomes emotional as she testifies in her murder trial in Dallas, Texas. Picture: AP

In September 2018, Guyger walked up to Mr Jean’s apartment — which was on the fourth floor, directly above hers on the third — and found the door unlocked. She was off duty but still dressed in her police uniform after a long shift when she shot Mr Jean with her service weapon.

The 26-year-old accountant had been eating a bowl of ice cream before Guyger entered his home.

Guyger was arrested three days after the killing. She was later sacked and charged with murder but only spoke publicly about the shooting upon taking the witness stand last Friday.

The 31-year-old tearfully apologised for killing Mr Jean and told the jurors she feared for her life upon finding the door to what she thought was her apartment unlocked.

Guyger (right) shot Botham Jean (left) while off duty in Dallas. She entered his home, supposedly believing it was her own, fatally shooting him as he ate ice cream. Pic: AP

Guyger said Mr Jean came towards her at a fast walk when she entered with her gun out, but prosecutors have suggested he was just rising from a couch toward the back of the room when the officer shot him.

In a frantic 911 call played repeatedly during the trial, Guyger said “I thought it was my apartment” nearly 20 times.

Her lawyers argued the identical physical appearance of the apartment complex from floor to floor frequently led tenants to the wrong apartments.

Prosecutors, however, questioned how Guyger could have missed numerous signs that she was in the wrong place and suggested she was distracted by sexually explicit phone messages with her police partner.

Botham Jean's mother, Allison Jean (centre) outside the courtroom after former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger was found guilty of murder. Pic: AP

They also asked why Guyger didn’t radio in for help when she thought there was a break-in at her home.

Guyger said that going through the doorway with her pistol drawn “was the only option that went through my head”.

EXPLICIT TEXTS

Guyger sent a message to her police partner Martin Rivera saying she was “super horny today” and a Snapchat message saying “Wanna touch?” hours before the incident.

Just prior to the shooting, prosecutors also said Guyger was on the phone with Mr Rivera for 16 minutes. Prosecutors made the argument that Guyger was distracted by her phone conversation with Mr Rivera, leading her to mistake Mr Jean’s apartment for hers.

After the shooting, Guyger sent two text messages to her partner while she was on the phone to 911 as Mr Jean was bleeding to death on his floor.

She texted him to say “I’m f***ed” and she needed him in the minutes after she shot Mr Jean, the court heard.

Taking the stand during the trial, Mr Rivera acknowledged they had a sexual relationship and exchanged sexually explicit text messages and photos with her the day she shot Mr Jean. However, he denied making plans to rendezvous with Guyger later that night as prosecutors suggested.

Prosecutors questioned Mr Rivera extensively about the 16-minute phone conversation he had with Guyger as she headed to her apartment that night in September 2018.

Asked what it was about, he said he believed it was mostly about police work but his memory of the call was hazy. Again, however, he denied it involved plans to see Guyger later that evening.

Prosecutors said after Guyger shot Mr Jean, she deleted the logs of her text exchanges with Mr Rivera from her mobile phone. Mr Rivera said he didn’t not know why she had done this but acknowledged having done the same as well.

YOUNG MAN WITH BRIGHT FUTURE

Mr Jean, who grew up in the Caribbean island nation of Saint Lucia, came to the US for college before starting his career as an accountant.

His shooting drew widespread attention because of the strange circumstances and because it was one in a string of shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers.

“A 26-year-old college-educated black man, certified public accountant, working for one of the big three accounting firms in the world … it shouldn’t take all of that for unarmed black and brown people in America to get justice,” Benjamin Crump, one of the lawyers for Mr Jean’s family, said at a news conference.

Mr Crump said the verdict honours other people of colour who were killed by police officers who were not convicted of a crime.

Guyger told police she thought Mr Jean’s apartment was her own and that he was an intruder. Pic: AP

Various studies have shown black people in the US are much more likely than white people to be shot by police.

In 2015, The Guardianfound that black men aged 18 to 34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers despite only making up 2 per cent of the total US population.

In 2016, the same research found police killed black Americans at a rate of 6.66 per 1 million people compared with 2.9 per million for white Americans.

Part of this could be because police tend to patrol high-crime neighbourhoods, which are disproportionately black.

But other research has found shooter bias could play a role in some officers’ instinctive reaction when it comes to killing black people. For example, Vox has reported on studies showing officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations.

In June of this year, former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor was sentenced to 12.5 years in prison for third-degree murder and manslaughter in the 2017 shooting of unarmed Australian woman Justine Damond.