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He Was Home: Botham Jean · Both Things Are True Crime

• bo: Around four days ago, more or less, on Friday, october the sixteenth, two thousand twenty six, a woman walked out of a prison in Gatesville, Texas. Her lawyer says she's going to live quietly in an undisclosed location. She had served seven years of a ten year sentence for walking into a man's apartment and shooting him twice in the chest while he sat on his own couch eating a bowl of ice cream. And I want you to hold a date next to a date. Next to a date for me. Okay? September 29th, Botham Jean would have turned 35 three weeks ago. October the first, twenty nineteen, she was convicted of his murder. October the first, twenty twenty six, seven years later, to the day the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles granted her parole. October sixteenth, twenty twenty six she goes home. And I'm gonna tell you something before I say one more word, and then I'm going to tell you why this episode is different than every other one I've ever made. I knew Bo. Not well, not the way his family knew him or his real friends knew him, but I sat across from a pool table from that man and I talked to him and I know what his voice sounded like when he was being nice to a girl who had nowhere else to sit. So what I'm gonna do With this next hour, is I'm not going to pretend I'm outside of this. Every other episode on the show I come in from the outside, right? This time I don't. And y I feel like you should weigh everything I say accordingly, the way you weigh anything said by a person telling you a story they are made inside of. There's also a lot of law in here. The Castle Doctrine, Mistake of Fact, the difference between murder and criminally negligent homicide, how a parole board actually decides. And I'm doing all of it because Bo at that time was 26 and brilliant. And the people who loved him have spent eight years, I feel like, having this explained to people badly. And near the end, there is a part that is me, not the record, and I'm gonna tell you when I get there. I always do that anyway. I love you guys. Hold on, let's talk about it. Let's go in. We're gonna go. So we're actually not starting in Dallas. We're gonna start in a dorm lobby in Arkansas because that's where I start. Harding University, Cersei, Arkansas. If you didn't go to a Christian school, let me set the scene because the rules are the whole reason I knew Bo. Now, at Harding, there are no mixed gender dorms. None. A man does not go up into the woman's dorm and a woman does not go up into the men's dorm. This is not a suggestion. So when you're a girl, as I am, and you want to see your boyfriend, as I did, you go to his dorm and you stop in the lobby and you wait. And part of an RA's job at Harding is desk duty. They typically will sit at the desk and make sure anybody who's not supposed to be there doesn't go upstairs. Wrong gender, not a student, doesn't matter. That's the job. And Bo was actually my ex husband's resident assistant, his RA. Now here's the thing about the man I was dating at the time. He was very, very, very, very hard to wake up. Okay. Once that man was asleep, he was asleep. And I was like seventeen, no, eighteen or nineteen. years old. And to my to me, I thought I was all the way in love for the first time ever in my life. I didn't end up marrying the person. we're divorced. But It kind of means like I'm the kind of girl who would sit in a lobby for hours waiting for a boy to wake up and come downstairs and hang out with her 'cause obviously I can't go up there. Hours sometimes. Plural. More than once. That lobby had a pool table too. I'm pretty sure it also had a board game. And at that desk was Bo. Now I didn't spend a lot of time with him, and I want to be accurate about that because I'm not about to claim a closeness I didn't have. Me and Bo were not close friends. I was a girl in the lobby, but I spent some. And every single time he was just kind and humble and he was caring. He wasn't performing it. He wasn't a guy at the desk doing the minimum. He was just actually warm to a person who was kind of essentially furniture in his work day. And I think about that a lot now because of who he turned out to be for everybody else. Because when he died and all these people came forward about who he was, every one of them said the same thing I would have said. I didn't know one day he'd be someone everyone would know. He wasn't anything to me except the nice Ray at the desk who made the waiting lot less weird and he could sing when he'd let dropdog on so he could sing. That's the thing about character. It shows up in the rooms where nothing is at stake. Bolton Shem Jean was born September 29th, 1991, in St. Lucia. St. Lucia, the island. His parents are Allison and Berjam Jean. And his siblings are Brand and Alyssa. And you're gonna hear both those names again before this is over. And he came to the Hard he came to the United States for school to Harding. And Harding is a Church of Christ University in Arkansas. And he sang and he led worship. And if you look up footage of him at Harding, you'll find him singing. And like I said, he was good. So he graduates and he goes to work for Prince Waterhouse Coopers in Dallas as an accountant, PWC, one of the big four accounting firms. This is not an easy place to get a job. And he was 26 years old and he had an apartment at the Southside Flats in Dallas, apartment 1478, the fourth floor. And his uncle, he said after Bo died that Bo had aspirations toward leadership in St. Lucia, that he was going to be going back. And when you think about it, that is a whole life that was built. School, then the firm, then the plan. He was twenty-six years old and he was still in the part where you're stacking the bricks. And on that unfortunate night, From what I can recall, he was just in his living room on a Thursday night, and it was a Thursday, and he was in his shorts, and he was in a t-shirt and he was watching TV and he was eating a bowl of ice cream. Amber Geiger was a Dallas police officer, five years in the job. She lived in the same complex in apartment 1378 on the third floor. And she was off duty that night, but she was still in her uniform. Remember that too, because it's going to decide who pays. But one number apart, one floor apart, his directly above hers. And so this night, she's working a long shift, apparently, about 14 hours, right? And in the four days before it, she has worked more than 44 hours, including a whole day with the SWAT team. And hold on to those numbers because in 2026 they turn into a lawsuit. But at this point, she drives home and she parks on the fourth floor instead of the third and she walks to apartment fourteen seventy eight and she puts her key in the fob. The door is not fully latched. So it opens. And she shot him twice in the chest. He was twenty six years old. He was in his own living room and he had not done a single thing. One shot goes past him into the back wall, out into the night, over residential area, nobody else was hit. The other one, it hits him in the chest just above his heart, and it travels downward through his heart. His lung, his stomach, his intestine. And it came to rest in a muscle deep in his torso. And I'm only describing that because the downward path matters enormously at trial, and I will come back to it. So Amber Geiger calls 911 at about 10 o'clock at night, right? And on that call, she is saying one thing over and over again. I thought it was my apartment. And depending on who counted, she may have said it about 19 to 22 times in about five minutes. And here's what prosecution hammered, right? And this is a very single important fact in the trial. On the nine one one call, she never once says he came at me. He had a weapon. She never once even said she was afraid. Not one time in five minutes, not in nineteen repetitions. She said she shot a man because she thought it was her apartment. Now I wanna talk about a part that I watched happen in real time because this is kinda where I come back in. I found out he died on the shade room. Of all places. To be real with y'all, that you really must social media scene. I don't think it's most. It just came through my feed and I was scrolling and there's his face. So then I go to Facebook and in those first hours there were videos, tenants at the complex, standing out in those hallways, recording what was happening. Or filming excuse me, the scene and filming the police and narrating what they were watching and those videos later disappeared. I'm just telling you that as my own memory, it's not as some documented fact because I can't hand you a link to a video that isn't there anymore. But I know I saw them and I went looking later and they were gone. And like people's accounts get taken all down all the time. So you know what? Make of that what you will I just know what I saw and I know what I couldn't find after. And then there's another thing, right? Because people started saying, they must have been dating. There that had to be it had been more to it, right? That you don't just walk into a stranger's apartment and shoot him. So they must have had something going on. There must have been a fight. There must have been a reason. Listen, I want to be very clear about this because it is one of the two reasons I'm making this episode, right? Maybe three. There has never been one single shred, a single piece of evidence that both them Jean and Amber Geiger knew each other. Not a text, not a call, not a witness, not a photograph. nothing. The state's own case was that this was a woman who went to the wrong door. The defenses case was that this was a woman who went to the wrong door. On that, the both sides who agreed on almost nothing else, they agreed on that. So where did that rumor come from? I part of me thinks that it comes from the fact that people could not sit with the real answer. Because the real answer is that a black man, a black person, a white person, a gray person, a any person Could be sitting in their own home, eating ice cream, bothering nobody, doing absolutely everything right, and still be killed. And that is an unbearable thought. So I think that sometimes people need to go looking for a reason because a reason means there's a rule. And a rule we can follow. And if you follow it, you could be safe. But there was no reason. He was home. And then there was the other thing they did, right? Because days after he was killed, a search warrant for his apartment was executed and the return listed what was found inside. And the item that somehow made it into every headline in America was a small amount of marijuana. A man was shot in his own living room and the pro press release wants to let us know what was in his cabinet. And let's sit with the actual logic of that there, right? Because what possible relevance does that have? He wasn't accused of anything. He wasn't resisting anything. He was killed by somebody who did not know he existed until the second she pulled the trigger. And that detail was not information. I think that detail was a character reference submitted for a dead man who was not on trial. And that's just the way I feel about it. I don't care. So now this one. And this is the other reason why I'm doing this episode. If you look at what happened at the scene, and I'm not editorializing here, this is in the trial record because the prosecutor played the N-CAR video for the jury on cross-examination. After Amber shoots Bo, officers arrive, right? And Amber is outside in the hallway, and the people come to the scene, including her friends. They are fellow officers who are not even part of the investigation. They are standing around and they are comforting her. Eventually, a sergeant he comes and he takes away from her little friends and he puts her in a car. And in that car, there was a camera. And in that camera, it records two angles, one looking out and one looking at her. And on that video, to nobody's surprise, at least not mine's, she ain't sobbing. She just talking normally. It's the Thursday for her. And she asked the sergeant whether she should keep the thing rolling. The sergeant's Yeah, yeah, keep it rolling. Just don't be saying nothing. And at one point, the door of the car ampers in. opens, right? And she looks out, but then she shuts the door and she just like looks down at her phone. And thing she couldn't face herself to see was both. being carried out by the paramedics. She couldn't bear to see. She couldn't face she couldn't look at what she had did. Instead she had to look at her phone. Because she didn't want to see his body. She wasn't arrested that night. it wasn't until three days later, on September the ninth, twenty eighteen, that she got charged. and the charge was manslaughter, it wasn't murder, and it was the Texas Rangers who ended up taking the case, not even the Dallas police. And so then Amber postponed and she goes home. And then in November 2018, she gets indicted for murder by a grand jury. And a part that I kinda keep coming to, because the prosecutor, he says it out loud, right? in his opening statement and he tells the jury that when a regular person is suspected of a crime, they typically get arrested, right? They get handcuffed, they get put in a car, they get taken downtown, they get interrogated, they get put in jail typically. But police officers don't get treated like that. And this was something that he had said to the jury in the first fifteen minutes. And I wanna add something here that I didn't have the last time I looked at this case because he came out of the family's own lawyers mouth this month. But after the parole was granted, Lee Merritt, one of Jean's family's attorneys, said the family never intended to blame Amber Geiger alone. And he pointed at two things. So first thing he pointed at was her police training. Because it permitted an officer to shoot when a person's hands are not visible. And he pointed at the Texas Rangers and he said they found she did nothing wrong. So I went and I looked I wanted to find out what he was talking about. And I find the real version to be sharper than the actual summary. So, the lead investigator on this case was a Texas Ranger named David Armstrong, right? And during the trial, Armstrong says he ain't believe Amber Geiger committed no crime at all, not murder, manslaughter, not criminally negligent homicide. His words were, I don't believe it was a reckless or criminally negligent based on the totality of the investigation. So The lead investigator, the man the state went to find out what happened. He said, Ain't no crime here. Are you b The jury never heard a word of it. Because he said it when the jury was not in the room. And so they had a hearing about whether the testimony was even allowed at in at all. And the prosecutor, Jason Hermes, I think is his name, he argued that this was inappropriate and that deciding whether the shooting was reasonable is the jury's job and nobody else. And thank the Lord the judge agreed with him. She ruled that the defense could not be asking Armstrong whether he thought the shooting was reasonable. So I think that's interesting. And we're gonna hold it, okay? Because this is the same judge who's gonna come down at that bitch at the end, and she's gonna give Amber Gagger a Bible. Judge Tammy Kemp. She's the person who also kept the Lead Rangers' opinion away from that jury. Can y'all help hold both things? Because I'm gonna have to come back to her and talk about her, okay? So now back to the marriage other point, right? Let's go to the other point, the training. Because it turns the cross-examination that I end up hearing completely sideways. The prosecutors, they take her training apart in front of that jury piece by piece. And I think it is the most effective thing on. That trial and the family's own lawyer, they are telling you eight years later that the training is what let her do it in the first place. And now I'm gonna really have to apologize on this episode, y'all, because the the slides will not be matching up with the conversation, okay? Because, like, this is personal to me. I knew Bo at like it hits a different way. and sometimes I'm just talking and I ain't got time to even hit the next button on slides, okay? So I do apologize if we're if I'm a little behind and if we miss some slides to this this episode, please just have patience with me, okay? So we're gonna talk about the law a little bit, all right? So Amber Geiger got indicted for murder under Texas law, and the indictment it was charged two ways, and that's normal. One, that she intentionally and unknowingly caused his death by shooting him. Two That she intended to cause serious bodily injury and committed an act clearly dangerous to human life that caused his death. So, either one is murder, the jury only has to agree on one. And the fight at the trial was never really about if she shot him. She admitted that in the first five minutes of her own testimony. The fight was about her state of mind and whether the law gave her a way out. And she had two possible exits, and I'm gonna walk you through both of them because I Think they're very interesting law, and because one of them is honestly one of the most upside-down things I have really read in a court file. So exit one. Mistake of fact. This is Texas Penal Code, Section Eight, Chapter 8, Rule 2. So this is the first citation I've read in this episode. I'm gonna tell you guys how I've learned how to read it. Texas Penal Code is the body of their law, right? For that state. And section eight. Point two is a specific rule inside of it. Chapter eight, rule two, that's the whole trick. Name of the code, then the number of the rule. Every citation tonight is basically that shape. And the idea is simple. If you were honestly mistaken about a fact and that mistake means you didn't actually have the mental state the crime requires, you get a defense. So let me give you guys example, right? You walk out of a restaurant with somebody's umbrella because you thought it was yours. Well, theft requires an intent. An intent to steal. You didn't have one. You were mistaken. So you're not guilty. And Amber's version was basically this: I was mistaken about which apartment I was in. Therefore, my mistake should excuse what I did. And I want y'all to hold that. Just remember, we're gonna come back to it because the courts later, the appeal courts, I mean, they destroy it. And their reasoning, is beautiful. And I'm gonna remind you guys about it. We'll get back to it, okay? So The second exit. The judge instructed the jury on the castle doctrine. And I think most people are familiar with the castle doctrine to some degree, okay? But the castle doctrine, to put it in official terms, is the principle that your home is your castle in your home. You don't have a duty to retreat. And the law gives you a presumption that your fear was reasonable if somebody is unlawfully entering. It was his castle. He was the one in his home. He was the one who had someone unlawfully entering. If any human being in that apartment was entitled to the protection of the castle doctrine, it was Bo, who was sitting in his own living room when an armed stranger opened his door. And the instruction went to her. Because she believed it was her apartment. And so the defense's position was that she should get the benefit of the law as she understood her situation to be. And the judge allowed the jury to consider it. And I understand how that argument gets made, right? Because self-defense law generally runs on what the defendant reasonably believed, not what was objectively true. That's the real principle, and it exists for real reasons. But like let's really sit with the picture for a second, right? Because a man gets killed in his own home, and the legal doctrine written to protect people in their own homes gets handed to the actual person who came through the door. And sometimes she looks like the Grinch. That's all I want to say. Sorry. Sometimes it gets shady, okay? Sometimes she likes the Grinch. But the jury. Got told they could consider it and they rejected it anyway. I love that. And in about six hours on October first, twenty nineteen, they came back guilty of murder. And y'all know she took the stand. You know, most the defendants don't Disney testify. You don't have to, and then the juries is instructed, they can't hold it against you, and your lawyer normally don't want you to do it either. But she testified. And I do understand why her team did it because their whole case is her state of mind, right? And how can you prove somebody actually believed that without putting them in front of the jury? I can't testify to your state of mind, even from your lawyer. So the defense opened by telling the jury, you will hear from Amber. You will get to know her. I'm okay. So they ran through her whole life, right? Arlington, her mom working, orchestra, band, violin, trumpet. She was in a all female mariachi band, working retail in high school, working her way up to assistant manager, working full time at T G. I Fridays while Talking, taking 12 hours at a semester at UT Arlington, Criminology, Police Academy. She was in class number 336. The crime response team. Listen, that is a compson story and a sympathy story at the same time. And it was effective. I'm not gonna pretend it wasn't, but I just really wanted to get through all her stuff real quick. That was gonna be a real quick, okay? Could have made it shorter. But She then walked them through that night, step by step. They even did a physical demonstration in the courtroom where she stood up and she showed the jury how she carried her equipment and how she put the key in the door. And her account was basically the key went in, the door pushed open, she heard movement, she saw a silhouette at the back of the apartment. She drew her weapon, she yelled, Let me see your hands. He came towards her saying, Hey, hey, hey, and she fired twice. And then the state gets up. And the cross examination of Amber Geiger is one of the most effective things. I ain't gonna lie. And I'm gonna show y'all the moves, okay? We're gonna talk about it. I've been waiting talking about it. Okay. Move one. He made her say it. So he walks her through it, right? You knew you were using deadly force. Yes. You know what a bullet can do. Yes. You shot him twice, center mass, exactly where you were trained to shoot. Yes. And then when you pulled that trigger. You intended to kill him. And she said yes. That's the whole murder element out of the defendant's own mouth on the record. Everything after that is just the jury deciding whether anything even excuses it. Move two. The backpack. So Amber, she carried her work backpack into that apartment and she set it down next to Bo. And let me tell me what was in that backpack. Combat guys. Hemostatic dressing, I said that wrong probably. A first aid kit, bleeding control supplies, the exact items you carry so you can keep somebody from bleeding out and all of it was sealed, unopened, and pristine packaging. The prosecutor held it up, was like, why didn't you use it? She said she didn't even think about it. Move three, the five minutes. Bo was on that floor dying. She was on the phone with Nylon One for about five minutes. And in those five minutes, she sends she has time and the thought and the brain to text her partner. And she texts him, I need you hurry. And then I messed up. And so the prosecutor makes her account for both, right? Like you stopped to do that, yes. And then you did it again a minute later. Yes. And he wants to know whether she put her own knees over his. And she says no. No one accepted that, not the jury, not him. I just hate I just hate that about that. I just hate it. Move four, the thing she couldn't explain. So he makes Amber stand up and he puts a man in the room where she was saying Bo was standing. And then he points at the medical examiner's trajectory, you know, the bullet that went downward through his chest. And for that bullet to go into that angle with her standing where she said and him standing where she said, he would have to have been bent over. She says she didn't know. He asked if she had any reason to think the medical examiner was lying and she said no. Move five, the choice. This is the one that I think really ended it for her. Because he walks her through her own training, right? And he's like, You're trained to take a position of cover and concealment. Yes. You had a police radio? Yes. The response time that night was about what? Two minutes? Yes. So you could have backed off. You could have taken cover, you could have called it in and had the whole department there in two minutes. She's like, I could've. Then he says, If you had done Any one of those things, Mr. Gene would probably be alive today. And she says, Yes, sir. Now I think both things are true about that cross-examination, right? It was devastating and it was fair. He didn't trick her, he didn't invent anything. He took her training, her own words, and the physical evidence, and he laid them next to each other, and the gap did the work. And now put it next to what her family's lawyers said this month, or what the family lawyers this month, the Bose family. lawyer said this month. The prosecutor, they use her training to convict her. The family says the training is what permitted her to shoot in the first place. And I think both of all those things can be true. And if they are, then the man who won that trial and the family who lost everything are kind of pointing at the same document from opposite ends. So October 1st, 2019, she gets guilty of murder. And in Texas, murder carries five to ninety-nine years or life. And the next day, after the sentencing phase, the jury gave her 10. 10 years. The bottom of the range, plus five. And I wanna say something about that number that I think gets missed from my reading in the comments because people tend to blame the jury a lot of times. But that jury convicted a police officer of murder, and that never really happens. I kind of feel like they did the hard part, right? And then on the punishment, they heard a sentencing phase full of mitigation and they landed at 10. And I'm not gonna tell you they did it right, but I will tell you that convicting her at all, I don't really think is a small thing. And in a country where officers are almost never convicted for an on or off-duty shooting, 12 people in Dallas looked at this cop and said murder. And I think both things are true. They did something rare and Ten years for a man's life in his own home is not enough, and I don't think those two cancel each other out. And I need you to remember that number for the rest of this episode because of something I didn't understand until I sat down with the parole file this week. Ten years is the whole ball game. Everything that happened last Friday was decided in that courtroom in October 2019, and I'm gonna show you why. But let's talk about the moment at the whole world's all. Brandon Jean. Bo's younger brother, 18 years old at the time, he gave a victim impact statement. And then he said he forgives Amber. And he said he didn't want her to go to jail. And he said he wanted the best for her. And then he asked the judge if he could give her a yes. And Judge Tammy Kemp said yes. So Brandt goes down and hugs Amber Geiger. And also Judge Tammy Kemp comes down off the bench and hugs her too and gives her a Bible and told her that since his brother forgiven her. That Amber should forgive herself. Here is where I'm gonna have to hold another thing at once, but on once, okay? And I'm gonna be honest, even though this is the part where some people may get mad at me. Bo's brother's forgiveness is his. It belongs to him. It's not mine to have an opinion about it. And I'm not gonna sit here and tell a grieving teenager boy how to grieve his big brother. If forgiving hurt is what let that young man keep living, then I think that's holy. I think that's his, and I won't touch it. But also personally watching it, it hurt me. Not because of him, but because of what I watched happen to it afterwards, where the hug became the story. It got put on almost every screen in America. And it got used, not by the jeans, but by everybody else, as the ending, as the resolution, as proof that the thing was closed, and now we should all feel okay. No, I feel like a black family's grace got taken and used as a bow on top of a box that was not finished. And the judge is a different question, okay? Because the judge Last time I checked, she is not a grieving family member, okay? The judge is the state. So the Freedom from Religion Foundation, they ended up filing an ethics complaint with Miss Tammy Kemp. with the Texas State Commissions on Judicial Conduct over the Bible. And Judge Kemp, she defended herself publicly and Geiger, she said that Geiger was asking her, like, could God forgive me? And Judge Tammy Kemp, she said I was answering as a human being. Now, I could not confirm how the commission ultimately resolved it. And so I don't know. But that's what happened. But I think the question underneath the complaint is a real one, and I think is worth knowing because the judge is supposed to be the one neutral thing in the room, right? She's not supposed to be a participant, he's not supposed to be a comforter, she's not supposed to be a minister. The whole reason our judges are we are supposed to be able to trust their verdict is that the person in the robe does not have a side. So when that robe comes down off the bench and it embraces the convicted defendant in front of the family of the man she killed, I feel like something gets communicated about who that room was built for, even if every bit of it was sincere, even if it came from love. And this is where I have to put Ranger Armstrong back on the table because I feel like it complicates her in a direction nobody talks about. Because the same judge who came down off that bench Embrace the woman who killed Beau is the judge who refused to let the jury hear the lead investigator say no crime had been committed. That ruling helped the prosecution and it may be a part of why there was a conviction to even hug anybody about. She's not a simple figure. And I'm not gonna flatten her into one. I do believe that Judge Kemp meant it. I believe that she also ran that trial in a way that gave the state its verdict, and I believe that That the Gene family had to sit there and watch the end of it. All three are true. So let's talk about Joshua Brown. Joshua Brown is a man who lived across the hall from Bo, right? And he testified at the trial. He is one of the people who heard what happened that night. And he is the one who told the jury what he heard from the hallway, and he was in tears on the stand talking about Bo. Ten days after the verdict, on Friday, October 4th, 2019, Joshua Brown was shot and killed in Dallas. Dallas police said within days that it was a drug deal that went bad. And in December of 2019, three men were indicted for his murder. The city didn't believe it. A lot of people still don't. So let me give you the facts. I'm gonna let you carry it for yourself, okay, in this part. Because here's what's documented. Joshua testified for the state against a police officer. Ten days later, he was dead. Dallas police, the same department, whose officer had just been convicted. announces the motive pretty quickly, three men are indicted, and his attorney publicly says that Joshua Brown was also set to be a witness in the Jeans Family Sybil case against the city of Dallas. Here's what I'm not gonna do with this scene. I'm not gonna tell you the Dallas Police Department killed Joshua Brown or had him killed. That's crazy, okay? That's crazy work. I have no evidence of that. And so as far as I can see, nobody else does either. But what I will say is that when a witness against the police is killed 10 days after he testifies, and the police are the ones who tell you why, I think the fact that the explanation might be completely true doesn't even fix the problem, right? Because I feel like the problem is more so that us, the public, we have no way to check it. And I think trust is a thing you build before you need it. And I don't think this department had it to spend. And I think that's the record. Keep it separate in your head from the last seen this conversation though. Because in the last part that I talk about, I'm gonna tell you what I think and I kinda want you to be able to tell the difference. But I'll get there. So no surprise, Amber appealed. They all do. Her argument was not that she was innocent, it was that the evidence only supported a lesser crime, criminally negligent homicide, and the court should reform the judgment and send it back for a new sentence. So, criminally negligent homicide in Texas is when you ought to have been aware of substantial and justif unjustifiable risk and you weren't. This is a state jail felony. The exposure is about a fraction of murder. And on August the fifth, 2021. The fifth court's appeals in the Dallas affirmed the murder conviction. They We ain't got it to do, my love. And the reasoning on the mistake of fact. point is the single cleanest piece of law in this entire case. The court said her mistaken beliefs did not negate her intent to kill. Her mistake about whose apartment she was in. was relevant only to whether she was justified in shooting him, and it wrote that her right to act in self defense, if applied at all, did not negate her intent to kill Jean. Y'all hear what I said? Mistake effect works when the mistake erases the mental state. Umbrella guy, he ain't intended to steal, but she intended to kill, and she says so on the stand. So being wrong about the room does not make the trigger pull an accident. It only could have made it excusable, and the jury has already decided that it didn't. And the court also handed the self-defense in one sentence I literally think about constantly. It said Gene was in his own home and was not attempting to enter. Geiger's apartment. He was home. That's it. That's the holding. Amen. So there's also a civil case, right? Kind of talk about it. And the civil case is a completely separate track with a way lower burden of proof. And November 2024, a jury returned a verdict of 98.65 million, 38.6 million in compensary compensary damages, and 60 million in punitive. And the family axed for 54.4, and the jury nearly doubled it. And the verdict was against her, not Dallas. The family tried. Their attorney argued that the city should share the liability because the city hired her and the city trained her. And the city asked to be removed in the lawsuit, and the court granted it. And the reason is a doctrine I'm gonna talk about. Because it's the reason almost every city walks out of almost every one of these, and it is called the Monell. Liability. So after a Supreme Court case from 1978, under the federal civil rights statue, these suits run on, a city is not automatically on the hook for what its officers do. There's no version of you did it, so your employer pays. And to get a city, you have to prove deliberate indifference, which in practice means showing that this kind of thing has happened before more than once and that the city knew, but the city did nothing. And that's a wall. Cities get dismissed out of these cases as a matter of routine and Dallas got dismissed out of this one. So for two years, I would have told you that number was symbolic. She doesn't have $98 million. What a verdict like that does is put a figure on the record saying what the loss was worth next to the 10 years the state actually imposed. Except the family spent 2026 trying to make it real. And they are doing it through a completely different door. And some things did change. Dallas renamed about four miles of South Lamar as the Botham Jean Boulevard, and Texas passed the Botham Jean Act. which restricts officers from turning off their body cams during an act of investigation. So his name is on the law. And I think that matters. I do also think that this is the smallest possible version of mattering. And then this March, the Gene family, they filed something new. And this one I did not see coming. So in early March, from what I can see they sued the city of Dallas, right? And what they're asking for is not a new award They are asking for the court to make the city pay the old one. So it's basically this declaratory decatory judgment action, which basically means they're wanting the court to declare a set of facts to be legally true. Three of them. That Amber Geiger is a Dallas city employee was covered by the city's employee liability plan, that she used Bo's death with the meaning of that plan, and that the family is therefore allowed to come after the city to collect the judgment. And then they ask the court to order Dallas to pay. whatever it takes to satisfy it. So the ninety-eight million is not a symbol anymore. Now it's a bill with a dispute attached about who owes it. And here's the part of that complaint that kind of made me go back to the top of this episode, okay? Because they allege that Dallas covered its staffing gaps by assigning officers to overtime and that the overtime produced fatigue and stress. And then they put her timesheet in it. She clocked out Of a nearly 14 hour shift on a September sixth day on 2018, and in the four days before, she had worked more than forty four hours, including a day with SWAT. For eight years, that shift has been a detail. You know, kind of the thing you mentioned in passing about how a trained officer walked up one floor too many, and the f family's lawyers are now arguing, no, no, no, this is policy. That the exhaustion was manufactured by a staffing decision, and that the staffing decision is what belonged to the city. Which means, now, the answer to how did this happen is not. She was tired, is somebody decided to run the department tired. And here's what each side is actually arguing, because this is the best piece of law, I think, in this whole episode, and I have not seen anybody talk about it. I don't know why. So Dallas says four things, right? That the plan does not have to cover losses from criminal acts and willful misconduct, and that a murder conviction is exactly that. That governmental immunity under the Texas Constitution shields the city from money damages. That the family has no standing to make a claim on the city's plan in the first place. And they're saying that the staffing argument is irrelevant. But the family says three things. And I want you to hear the second one slowly. One. The city is legally responsible as her insurer and morally responsible because the staffing practices puts its own officers out there in that condition. Two, that Amber Geiger intentionally pulled the trigger, but she did not intend to break the law, which makes it for insurance purposes and accidents. And accidents are what insurance is for. And now three, that without The city, nobody ever gets paid, and she is left with a debt with no human being that could actually satisfy it. So let's go back to the second one, okay? Cause I did see you can take a little read it slowly, right? At the criminal trial, the defense said she was mistaken, that she did not mean do anything wrong, that she thought it was her own apartment, and the family fights that, right? The prosecution fights that the appeals court demolishes it. And then in 2026, the family is standing in a different courtroom arguing almost like a cousin of it, right? Not that she's innocent. But they're saying out loud they're not about to dispute the verdict, but that she did not intend to break the law because that is a sentence that turns a murder into a covered loss. That's not her proxy. That is what it looks like. When the only road to being paid runs through the language of an insurance policy. They didn't pick that road. That's the only one they got left. So a hearing was set for May 14th, 2026. The City Act's Word would be postponed, and it was. And as of the first of this month, no new date has been set and no court has ruled on any of it. And the city of Dallas, of course, from what I can see, they say they do not comment on litigation. Of course they're not. September twenty fifth of this year, there was a parole hearing. The Gene family went, they sat in that room, and they objected to her release. And on October first, two thousand twenty six, the board granted it anyway. She's seven years into a ten year sentence. On the seventh, anniversary on the verdict to the day two days after Bo would have turned thirty five. And on Friday, October sixteenth, she walked out of a prison at Gatesville. She had been on pro parole before, by the way, in October twenty thousand four, after five years and the board denied her. And I wanna put the board's own words from both decisions next to each other. In 2004, they say when they denied her the board stated reason was that the offense has elements of brutality, violence, and assault of behavior, and that she represented a continuing threat to the public safety. And then 2026, when they granted her the board stated reasons, included that she does not have a documented pattern of violence or assault of arrest or convictions, and that she maintained a satisfactory in the she completed the programs that she should have to get her and keep her stable employment. So, same board, same offense, two years apart, right? In 2024, the offense had these elements of brutality and violence. And in 2026, there's no documented pattern of violence. Both of those statements can be technically true at the same time. And that's exactly what I want you to understand about how parole works. Cause the parole board is not a court. And if you want to watch some, there's a channel when you took out Mandu, A N D O, I think, and he covers a lot of parole. meetings and revocations and he follows people through the justice system and it's a very, very good channel. I recommend go checking it out. But a parole board is not a court, right? It's not reviewing whether the conviction was right. It's weighing whether the sentence was just. And it's not weighing whether the sentence was just. Like what I'm trying to say is nobody at that table is asking whether 10 years was enough for Bo's life. Instead, the question the parole board has to ask is a very forward looking question. Given this person as they are today, What is the risk of releasing them? And have they done what the system asked them to do while they're inside? And by that measure, you have a first-time offender with no prior record, no disciplinary problems in prison, and completed programming. That's gonna be the easiest guess the parole board will probably see all year. The 2024 denial, it was about offense. She hadn't served enough time. The 2026 grant was about the person. Both things aboard are allowed to weigh, and the weighing just shifted. Which basically means the real choice was never really the parole boards. The choice the real choice was the ten years. Because once her number is ten, the back end math is fixed. A parole board was always going to look at her at some point. And she was always going to be the profile that gets a yes. She has no disciplinary problems. That's a really big one. The outcome everybody's angry about this month is honestly, it was set in a Dallas courtroom in 2019 in October. And that's not me defending the board. I'm just telling you what what what it is. And Lee married, he said that justice cannot be selective and that when a life is taken without cause, accountability has to mean something for everybody. And he said that a 10 year sentence, and he said that a 10 year sentence was already a fraction of what was lost. And releasing her after seven makes that loss feel smaller in the eyes of the system. He also said that the family would have been disappointed with whatever she got because she would have got out. They know. And he said that what the family wants out of this, which is not a longer sentence for one woman, it is a sentencing enhancement written into the law for officers who take a life under the color of state law. Basically, meaning if you kill somebody using the authority the state handed to you. That the number at that end should be bigger because of that, not smaller. And so Amber Geiger's lawyer said that she would be living somewhere private, somewhere undisclosed, and I have no interest in where she is. I want to be clear about that. Okay? I have zero interest. I don't care. What I do care about is that the arithmetic worked exactly the way the arithmetic was always going to work. And that nobody who set the number has to answer for the day it ran out. So this is me. Everything I'm from here, until I tell you otherwise, is me and it's not the record. And I'm saying that out loud on purpose so that you can throw out my part and please just keep the other I don't know how long if you minutes if you want to, okay? The other minutes I feel like they should stay on their own. This does not have to. I feel like we never got the truth. We got a conviction. Those aren't the same thing. And I think a lot of people confuse them, and I think the confusion is why everybody may have moved on. Because I think a conviction answers one question, right? Did the state prove the elements beyond a reasonable doubt? That's it. That's the whole job of a trial. A trial is not a truth commission. Nobody's obligated to explain anything to you at the end. And there are things in this record nobody has ever explained. These are not my opinion, these are in the file. She was on a 16-minute and 44-second phone call with her partner, with whom she had been having an affair with right up until minutes before she killed him. The prosecutor told the jury that the call, before the call, she was functioning normally, and after it, she started to miss every single sign. And he said out loud that he believed that there was something more to that conversation. So she and her partner, that partner, they had been exchanging messages all evening, including photographs. Those photographs were sent over Snapchat, which deletes them, and over MMS, which doesn't. And the MMS images were deleted off her phone a day or two after she killed Bo. She also deleted text from that night. And ten days after the verdict, the neighbor who testified was shot dead. So that list is a record. Every item on it is documented and none of it is a theory. And the record does not explain any of it. It just contains it. And now I have to tell you how my own brain works, because I think you deserve to know my bias before I hand you my feeling. I did not come to this case at a tidy distance. I did not pick it up years later off a list. I had a vested interest from the second I saw that post about Bo. being dead. And the way my brain works is that it tries very, very hard to make the most sense out of things. That's usually a strength and sometimes a problem because the road to making something make sense can sometimes honestly really take you way past it. But it does mean I go all the way through the investigative journey before I land anywhere. So understand that I did the work on this one and understand that I was never neutral while I did it. And here's what I came out the other side with. Nothing about the way Bo died made any sense. You couldn't make it make sense if you tried. I watched the entire trial so many times and it still does not make sense to me at the end of it. A police officer went through the door of a man who was sitting on his own couch. I think he was eating like a bowl of ice cream and he had a football game going. And the explanation we were given is that she was on the wrong floor. And and the thing is, I believe that is what the evidence shows. Both sides said it. The appeals court said it. I am not standing here telling you the wrong door was a lie. I'm telling you it. It does not feel like the whole thing, and I've never been able to put that down. And then there's the part that I genuinely do not like admitting because of the way it sounds. The new cycle after he died, it felt like a distraction. I'm gonna say that right, okay? The weed in the cabinet, like what does a small amount of marijuana in a man's kitchen have to do with an officer coming through his door while he eats ice cream in front of football game? Nothing. It has nothing to do with anything. And it was everywhere. And then the dating rumor. Then the various little pieces of character that got floated out as a dead man who wasn't on trial for anything. It felt like a series of steps were being taken to paint a picture of who Bo was. And I have never felt that way about a story before, and I don't love feeling it now because I know exactly the way it sounds when a person says the word distraction out loud on a true crime show. But I'm saying it anyway because it's me being honest and it's what I felt. And I am not going to pretend I did not feel it. And here's the thing about that painting job, because it did work. It didn't work. Because sorry, I'm always misspeaking, but it didn't work. And it didn't work because sorry you guys, there was nothing nobody could have said. I'm trying to tell y'all if somebody had stood up and told the world Bo was a serial killer, not one person who knew that man would believe it for a single second. There was never any version of Bo available to sell. You mess with the wrong person because he has and had such a strong character. You could not override that man's real life with a press pass. I'm trying to tell y'all. Like that is a huge part of why I feel as intensely about this as I do. And on a dating rumor, I'm gonna give you my own little small piece of evidence and then the limit of it, okay? In the small time I was around him, I watched girls be openly, obviously very taken with him, very endured, endeared. And from what I could see, it wasn't a two-way street, but was never interested, okay? I never once heard him talk about anybody, honestly, mention anybody or show any interest in anybody. He was just the nicest person, like honestly, the nicest person. And my limit is this: people knew him. Far better than I did. I was literally a girl in a lobby for a few hours, a handful of times. I am sure there were people he liked. I wouldn't know. So I'm not telling you anything about his private life because I don't know anything about his private life. And it's not my business and it's not yours either. I'm just telling you the rumor did not match one single thing I personally observed. And the court record doesn't support it either. And those two things sitting next to each other are why that rumor makes me as angry as it does. And then the videos, which I kinda already told you about, and I want to be precise about this because this is the part where some people could say I'm making some things up, okay? I saw them. There were videos, there were tenants in the hallways, filming, narrating. I saved them to my save section on Facebook. I had a screenshot of one of the links with the title of the video on it. I I one time I thought I was screen recording, but I wasn't. And later they were gone. The link had been taken down. And listen. I think the blore boring explanation is probably the real one, the right one, that social media platforms remove footage of situations like this all the time. That's routine, and that's likely just the answer. It just really didn't sit that well for me next to everything that was happening that time. And I'm not the only person who felt this, which is the only reason I've ever trusted the feeling at all. At that time, I was married to the man who also knew Bo. And he agreed with everything I said and everything I felt about it. And I'm gonna tell you the weakness not immediately, also, because you probably gonna think it anyway. That me and him were just two people as well. And two people who were in a relationship and talking to each other constantly can absolutely be an echo chamber instead of a second opinion. I know that. And it is still the case that the only other person I knew who actually met him looked at the same thing I saw and kind of saw the same shape. So here's what I actually believe, and it's gonna disappoint anybody who came here for a theory, because I don't got one. I'm not gonna hand you a story. I don't have a name. I don't have a motive. I don't have a mechanism. If I had one, I'd tell you and I would show you where I got it. But what I have is this. I think something else was going on underneath that night. And I do not know what it was, and I don't think any of us know what it was. I think whatever it was had nothing to do with Bo, and I think his death was where it came out. out inadvertently. And that's the whole feeling that he was the end result of something he was never the part of. And I want to be scrupulous about the difference between that and the list I read you a minute ago, okay? Because that list is record. Sixteen minute phone call, prosecutor saying out loud that he believed there was more to the conversation. Deleted images, the deleted text, the witness dead 10 days after he testifies, all documented, none of it mine. What I just gave you is a gut feeling. It's not an evidence of nothing. I I probably misspoke like 18 times. I think I said press Past is at a press release earlier. you can throw everything I said in the trash, okay? And keep every other minute episode, and I think this episode still stands up, which is exactly how I wanted to talk about it. And I'm telling you what I feel because this is my show and because I knew him, not because I can prove it. And whatever the unanswered part is, I want to say this spit either way, so it's already written. I believe completely that Bo had nothing to do with any of it. That is my record and my gut agree on. There has never been one shred of evidence connecting them. He didn't know her. He was not involved in anything. He was home. Whatever the unanswered part is, it's not his. It was never his. And I'm not gonna let the questions I have about her become a shadow on him because that is what the rumors did in 2018, and I'm not doing it in 2026. The questions I have are hers to answer. He was eating ice cream. Three weeks ago, Bo would have been thirty-five. He would have been thirteen years into a career. He might have been back in St. Lucia by now doing whatever the leadership thing he was building towards. He might have had kids. He he would have probably been someone's deacon and he would have absolutely still been singing. And this is the thing I think about sometimes a little bit more than the trial or the probe or any of it. I don't think he would remember me. I was a girl in the lobby. I was somebody's girlfriend waiting for a boy who would not wake up. If Bo were alive today and you showed him my picture, I think there's a good chance he wouldn't be able to place me. And that is completely fine because it's not the point. The point I want to make is he was kind to me anyway. He was kind in a room where there was nothing in it from him. He was kind to the furniture. And then he grew up, and the entire world found out that he was like that with everybody. And the only reason the world found out is that somebody killed him. I'm gonna be real with y'all, I would rather never known his name. So this week or last week she went home and I ain't gonna think about her. Instead, I'm gonna be thinking about a man at a desk in Cersei, Arkansas in the middle of the night keeping a nineteen year old girl company while she waited. I love y'all. And for real, y'all gonna really say my guy's name. Both of Shem Jean. Both.