“Let me see your hands,” the former officer, Amber R. Guyger, shouted in the courtroom, recounting the chaotic moments when she pulled out her service weapon and fired at what she thought was an intruder.
She said she only later realized that she had actually gone to the wrong floor and shot her upstairs neighbor, Botham Shem Jean, a 26-year-old accountant who prosecutors said had been startled while watching television and eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream in his home.
“I shot an innocent man,” Ms. Guyger said during several hours of testimony Friday morning, during which she at times defended herself in a quiet voice and at others sobbed to the point where she could not speak clearly.
Friday’s testimony in front of a packed courtroom was the first time that jurors heard directly from Ms. Guyger in a case that rests not on whether she shot Mr. Jean — that is not in dispute — but on whether the jury believes that it was a case of mistaken identity, and that the former police officer thought she was acting in self-defense. Ms. Guyger was the defense’s first witness, after prosecutors rested their case at the end of several days of testimony.
But the racial dynamics have played out far differently than in other high-profile cases. The jury is majority-black. The judge presiding over the trial is black, as is the Dallas County district attorney. Yet at least one senior Texas law enforcement investigator testified that the shooting was justified, and Mr. Jean’s family and friends, who took up three rows in the courtroom on Friday, are watching the case closely.
The trial has alternately cast Ms. Guyger as a tired but hard-working officer who mistakenly entered the wrong apartment and as a distracted, callous killer who made little effort to assist a dying young man on the night of the shooting in September 2018.
Mr. Jean lived in Unit 1478, and Ms. Guyger lived directly below him on the third floor in Unit 1378. As she walked down the fourth-floor hallway, she said, she did not encounter anyone or notice that anything was amiss.
Standing in front of the jury, Ms. Guyger pulled her backpack, lunchbox and heavy police vest onto her arm, just as she said she had done when carrying her gear in on the night of the shooting. She recalled how, in a matter of seconds, she put her keys into the keyhole, noticed that the door was already ajar and heard someone moving around inside.
After she opened the door, she said Mr. Jean started approaching her in a “fast-paced walk.” “Hey, hey, hey,” Mr. Jean was shouting, according to her testimony.
She fired her weapon twice at Mr. Jean, striking him once in the torso. “I was scared he was going to kill me,” she said.
Her account differed from the testimony of prosecution witnesses, who said that the trajectory of the bullet showed that Mr. Jean was either getting up from a seated position or was “in a cowering position” hiding behind a three-foot wall inside his apartment when he was shot.
Dr. Chester Gwin, a pathologist with the Dallas County medical examiner’s office, testified that the bullet that killed Mr. Jean traveled in a diagonal downward path through his body.
Three of Mr. Jean’s neighbors who live in the apartment complex testified that they heard no verbal commands before hearing two gunshots. Such testimony reinforced the theme of the prosecutor’s argument — that Ms. Guyger almost immediately pulled out her gun and shot Mr. Jean once she opened the door.
“For Amber Guyger, the mere presence of someone in her apartment that she thinks is hers means he has to die,” the prosecutor, Jason Hermus, told the jury earlier in the week.
Ms. Guyger testified that she briefly tried to perform CPR and a sternum rub on Mr. Jean while waiting for paramedics.
A key moment for the defense also unfolded earlier in the week, but not in the presence of the jury.
A Texas Ranger investigator, Sgt. David Armstrong, said that Ms. Guyger would have had probable cause to shoot Mr. Jean, who she thought was an intruder.
When asked whether he believed that Ms. Guyger committed a crime, Sergeant Armstrong testified, “Based on the totality of the circumstances, no.”
Marina Trahan Martinez reported from Dallas, and Sarah Mervosh from New York. Manny Fernandez contributed reporting from Houston (NY TIMES)