Former officer Aaron Dean sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison over Atatiana ... trends now
A former Texas police officer who fatally shot Atatiana Jefferson through a rear window was sentenced Tuesday to 11 years and 10 months in prison.
Aaron Dean, 38, had faced up to 20 years in prison, but jurors also had the option of sentencing him to probation. The same jury that convicted him of manslaughter Thursday also determined the sentence.
The white Fort Worth officer shot the 28-year-old black woman in 2019 while responding to a welfare check call about an open front door.
His guilty verdict was a rare conviction of an officer for killing someone who was also armed with a gun.
During the trial, the primary dispute was whether Dean knew Jefferson was armed. Dean testified that he saw her weapon, while prosecutors claimed the evidence showed otherwise.
Aaron Dean (pictured), 38, was sentenced Tuesday to 11 years and 10 months in prison for the 2019 fatal shooting of Atatiana Jefferson
Jefferson, pictured, was inside the home playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew and had left the door open to vent out smoke from the house
Dean shot Jefferson on October 12, 2019, after a neighbor called a nonemergency police line to report that the front door to Jefferson´s home was open.
She had been playing video games that night with her eight-year-old nephew and it emerged at trial that they left the doors open to vent smoke from hamburgers the boy burnt.
The case was unusual for the relative speed with which, amid public outrage, the Fort Worth Police Department released video of the shooting and arrested Dean.
He'd completed the police academy the year before and quit the force without speaking to investigators.
Since then, the case was repeatedly postponed amid lawyerly wrangling, the terminal illness of Dean's lead attorney and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Body camera footage showed that Dean and a second officer who responded to the call didn't identify themselves as police at the house.
Dean and Officer Carol Darch testified that they thought the house might have been burglarized and
