The details regarding the murder of Botham Jean has me fixated. He was the young, 26-year-old, highly accomplished accountant lounging around in his underwear in his own apartment when off-duty Dallas police officer Amber Guyger entered his apartment in an alleged case of I-thought-it-was-my-own-apartment, saw a tall dark silhouette, gave orders, and then fired two shots. One bullet hit Botham Jean and he subsequently died from his injuries.
One of the first issues that kept going through my mind upon hearing this, is how the death penalty was proffered. No attempt to arrest the perpetrator, but instead firing her weapon twice. One bullet missed and landed in a wall. We all know about the second one.
I watched several different news reports to get a basic idea of all that happened. Although the officer in her affidavit claimed the door was slightly ajar when she got there, a different resident posted a video, which showed that the doors in that particular facility automatically close. I also learned that Jean had a red carpet outside his front door. He had placed it there to differentiate his apartment from the others. Yet Officer Guyger completely missed that detail. Unless we find out she had a similar red carpet in front of her own apartment it, how she managed to overlook that major detail comes into question.
I’m also interested in understanding how she ended up driving all the way to the 4th floor to park her car as opposed to parking it on the third floor. Are there assigned parking spaces for the units? Are there any unique identifying features on either the 3rd or 4th floor which should have led the woman to know she was on a different floor?
One of the local news stations was permitted to film the inside of Jean’s apartment. In the video, the island in the kitchen was very messy. Yet no one has filmed the inside of the officer’s apartment to see if she kept her apartment just as messy. Or if the furniture layout is so different that she should have recognized her mistake prior to having shot Jean.
One of the last news reports claimed that there were drugs found inside Jean’s apartment. So what? The sick attempt to criminalize the victim in death when there wasn’t any criminal history in life is par for the course when a police department is trying to protect one of their own.
The head of the Dallas Police Department is an African-American woman. The prosecuting district attorney is also a black woman. Will their race make a difference in how this case is treated? Will the facts be presented so the truth falls where it may?
That is all to be seen!
