Jury watches bodycam video, hears from fellow officer in Aaron Dean murder trial
As the murder trial of former Fort Worth police officer Aaron Dean entered its second day Tuesday, jurors heard a video of Zion Carr that differed from the testimony he gave to the court Monday.
Zion, then 8 years old, was interviewed by an employee with Alliance for Children about two hours after the shooting death of his aunt Atatiana Jefferson on Oct. 12, 2019. He told the interviewer in 2019 that his aunt pointed her handgun at her bedroom window after hearing noises in their back yard about 2:30 a.m. He also stated he saw a badge and a flashlight outside the window and Dean’s weapon.
“I saw a gun out the window,” he said.
In the video, Zion said he heard, “Put your hands up” and “Put your hands up now.” Zion told the interviewer that Jefferson didn’t put her hands up and then she fell to the floor.
In his testimony in court Monday, Zion said he did not see anything outside and his aunt did not point her weapon. She kept the gun down by her side as she moved toward the window, he said.
During opening statements on Monday, attorneys disagreed about whether Dean saw Jefferson’s gun before he fatally shot her while responding to a neighbor’s call about open doors at her home.
Carol Darch testifies
Carol Darch, the officer who was with Dean the night of the shooting, took the witness stand next and shared her memories.
She confirmed she and Dean were called to an “open structure” on East Allen Avenue around 2:30 a.m., not a welfare check. An open structure call is treated as a silent alarm, which means the responding officers take care not to show their position, she said.
Darch said the front and side doors of Jefferson’s house were open but the glass storm doors were closed. She remembers thinking that was odd for that time of night. When they looked in the front door, Darch said, they saw open cabinets and stuff lying around like it had been taken out of drawers. She said it looked like the house had been burglarized.
Prosecutor Ashlea Deener asked if Darch could tell the difference between a ransacked house and a messy house and noted that officers were wrong about the house being burglarized.
Darch said she and Dean were searching the back yard when the shooting took place. She doesn’t remember when Dean unholstered his gun. She thinks she unholstered hers when they got ready to enter the back yard, but she didn’t put her finger on the trigger.
She and Dean were standing very close together, back-to-back, while clearing the yard, and she heard Dean give Jefferson the command to raise her hands, she said. Darch was turning around when she heard Dean fire one shot.
Darch said she saw a person through the window, but she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
“The only thing I could see was eyes,” Darch said, adding that the eyes were “as big as saucers.”
When asked by the prosecutor if Dean saw a gun, Darch said she couldn’t speak for what Dean or Jefferson saw.
Darch did testify that she never saw Jefferson’s gun and she does not remember that Dean ever said “gun” or warned her that he had seen a gun.
The prosecution played the video from Dean’s body camera while Darch was on the stand and asked her to explain what was happening in the video.
After the shooting, Dean can be heard on the video asking Darch if she has a first-aid kit. Jefferson can be heard crying and wailing after she was shot.
Dean and Darch entered the house. When they got to the back bedroom, Darch said, Zion became her top priority.
“As soon as I got through the door I heard the baby,” Darch said. “And that became my sole purpose.”
Darch said she did not see Dean perform CPR or any other lifesaving measures on Jefferson. She wrapped Zion in a blanket from the couch and took him outside.
The body-camera video shows Dean searching the bedroom. Dean muted the audio on his body camera at some point after backup officers arrived. Darch said she doesn’t know if someone told him to do that.
Darch said when she got outside she was thinking, “There’s someone dying inside the house.”
Other officers who arrived tried to save Jefferson, but she died in her bedroom, according to testimony and the video. She was 28.
The defense is trying to establish that Dean acted according to protocol for the type of call it was and that he thought a burglary was taking place.
The prosecution is trying to establish that Dean did not act in self-defense and did not follow the general orders of the Fort Worth Police Department. Deener had Darch explain the orders from the stand.
In an open structure call, officers are instructed to secure the entrances and exits so a potential burglar cannot escape. Darch admitted that she and Dean did not do that, even though they did examine the doors and did not find any evidence of a forced entry.
When officers find no sign of forced entry, they are supposed to contact the home owner, according to the orders read in court Tuesday. The officers did not do that. Darch testified they were still in the process of looking for signs of forced entry.
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 at him.
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.”
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.
911 call-taker and neighbor testify
Abriel Talbert was the one who took the call from Jefferson’s neighbor, James Smith, the night of Oct. 12, 2019. She said she answered calls for both 911 and the non-emergency line that Smith called.
Talbert testified on Tuesday why she classified that particular call as an open structure. She said what dictates the title of a call are the details the person on the other end of the line gives.
“The call details fit an open structure,” she said.
A welfare check, Talbert and Darch said, is a different type of call that 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.
Talbert said she included in her notes that the residents’ cars were in the driveway to show that the caller reported the situation was normal except for the open doors. Talbert said she also included in the notes sent to officers that the residents were normally there at that time of night to let them know that someone might be home.
Talbert didn’t know her role in the case until one of her supervisors told her several hours later that there was an officer-involved shooting at an open structure. She went back and looked it up and realized it was one of her calls.
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.
Smith testified after Talbert, and prosecutors played the audio of his call.
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.
