Latest / Both Things Are True Crime / Thirteen Months | Atatiana Jefferson
Transcript
- attaiana: So a man is in his living room in Texas, he's eating ice cream, and an off duty police officer walks in and kills him. Thirteen months later, a woman is in her living room in Texas playing video games with her nephew and an on duty police officer shoots through her bedroom window. And the first name. Bo them Jean. If heard the other episode, you know all of it. And if you did not You probably still have heard the name. The second is Atiana Jefferson. She was twenty eight years old and she was in her own house with an eight year old and her door was open because they had burned hamburgers and they were trying to just air out the smoke. Well, the jury convicted the officer of manslaughter, not murder, and then they chose a sentence. Eleven years, ten months, and twelve days. Ten, twelve, October the twelfth. They put the date she died inside of his sentence. Just a thought. And then two months ago, the city of Fort Worth, they paid to her family eleven and a quarter million dollars unanimously. One of the largest payouts in the city's history. So there's a verdict. And a sentence with her date death built into it and now a number from the city. Three different kinds of accountability in one case, which almost never happens. And his sister said something that I'm gonna keep coming back to at the end. because it's the truest thing I think anybody said all year. But this episode it has two completely separate legal tracks, and I Think that a lot of coverage I see smashes them together because there's the criminal case, which is the state of Texas prosecuting a man, and then there's a civil case, which is the family suing him in the city, which runs on totally different rules and a doctrine called qualified immunity. If you watch any First Amendment auditors, you've heard that phrase before, most likely. But they have different outcomes and they had different outcomes. And I'm gonna keep them apart because I think the difference is where a lot of the lesson is. There is also an eight-year-old in this story. His name is Zion Carr. He was in the room. He testified at trial when he was eleven, and now he's a young man. I am going to say what he saw because it was the central evidence in a public trial. And then I'm going to leave him alone because he is not content. Let's talk about it. Her first, of course. Atiana Kolkiss Jefferson. She was born November twenty-eighth, nineteen ninety. And she went to Xavier University, Louisiana. She graduated in two thousand fourteen. And Xavier is a historically black Catholic university in New Orleans. I didn't know that. I thought that was pretty cool. It has an almost legendary record for sending black students into medicine and more black graduates, They sent into medical school than almost anywhere in the country. And she was pre-med there, biology. And at the time she died, she was working in human resources. And I feel like this is the part that tells you who she was. Because in May of 2019, Atiana moved in with her mother, Yolanda Carr. She was sick. And she moved in to take care of her and her eight-year-old nephew Zion, who was living there too. So she's 28, she has a degree, she has a job. And she packs up and goes back home because her mother needs somebody. I can see my daughter doing the same thing. That's the woman. A caretaker. The one in the family who shows up and on the night of November eleventh, going to N October in the night of October eleventh, going into October the twelfth sorry, you guys know I always misspeak all the time. Misspeak and I don't pronounce words right, but we're still gonna be here talking about it. so anyway, on The night of October eleventh, going to October twelfth, her mother was in the hospital. And it was just Atiana and Zion in the house. And they were up late. They were cooking. They burned hamburgers. The house was filled with smoke. So they opened up the doors to kinda, you know, like let her out air out and stuff. And then they played some video games. A twenty-eight year old and an eight year old up in the middle of the night, doors open, playing video games. And then around 2 30 in the morning, a neighbor named James Smith noticed the doors were open at that hour. He just thought it was strange. Now, he did not call 911. He called the non-emergency line and he just asked for a welfare check. And the distinction matters. And the police themselves, they know it matters. A welfare check, a welfare, welfare check is when you go see if the folks are okay. It's not that there is a crime and In progress, and that neighbor he's spoken publicly about what it did to him because he said there was no domestic violence or arguing, nothing anybody should be concerned with. He said there was no reason for a gunshot, and this man he just calls for help for his neighbor, and his neighbor dies because he called, and he has to carry that. But so two officers respond, right? One of them was Aaron Dean. And Aaron, he did not park out front. He did not go to the front door or knock or ring anything. He didn't announce the police were here. You know, and they say, police, police. Instead, he went around the side of the house into the backyard with a flashlight. So inside, they're hearing noise around like 2 30 in the morning. And Atiana Jefferson, she gets her handgun out of her purse. It was hers. Legally owned, legally carried, and she goes to the bedroom window to look out. And later on, Dion testifies that she held the gun down at her side while she looked out the window. And so Dean comes up on the window, he sees a figure, and he shouts, right? The body claim catches it. He's like, Put your hands up, show me your hands. He fired through the glass within seconds of seeing her. Not after she refused, not after some exchange. Within seconds and at three five AM in the morning, she died in her own house. And there's a detail from the evidence I want you to have. Because it goes to the heart of the trial. So the body cam footage shows Dean's own flashlight reflecting off the glass. And you cannot see from that footage whether she was holding anything. And her his partner testified he could only see her face. So the officer fired through a window at a person in her own home when on his own camera, you cannot even establish what he actually saw. And then the police find her legally owned handgun near her body. And the department afterwards, they said that she had every right to protect herself inside her own home. And I want y'all to sit down with that for a second because it is the whole case in two sentences. The Fort Worth Police Department's own position after one of its officers killed her is that she is entitled to be holding that gun. Which means nobody in the story disputes that she did anything wrong. Not the state, the defense, not her own city's police department. But first, let me actually I want to go back backwards for about three minutes. And I'm telling you that so that the clock doesn't confuse you because everything in this scene it happened before that night. So Aaron Dean, the officer, right, he finished the academy around March 2018 and he joins the Fort Worth Police Department in April. October 19th is about 18 months later. And his personnel file Essentially has nothing in it. There's a traffic collision report, but his first year training records noted that the supervisors thought he had tunnel vision and that he needed improvement communicating with the public and with fellow officers. Tunnel vision. Written down by his own department before this happened. And there's also this, which the department knew when they hired him. So in 2004, Aaron, he was a student, right, at the University of Texas in Arlington, and he got a citation from For assault by contact, which is a class C misdemeanor, after he touched a woman's breast in the campus library and he pleaded no contest and paid a fine. Fort Worth, they reviewed it and they decided that, hey, listen, we're not gonna make a class C misdemeanor keep him out of the police force. And I'm not gonna tell you that one incident 15 years earlier predicted this. It did not. People are hired with records all the time. And I feel like most of them typically don't hurt anybody. But what I will say Is that it's in the file. And the file is just the thing that the department is supposed to use. So now we're gonna go back on the clock. October twelfth, twenty nineteen. And unfortunately, Atiana is Two days after the shooting on October 14th, the interim police chief Ed Krause named Dean publicly. And Dean resigned before he could get fired. Now, this looks like a small thing, but it's actually not. In Texas, when an officer is dishonorably discharged, that goes on a record with the state licensing body, the Texas Commission's on law enforcement. A lot of people I feel like they're mostly familiar with the GBI, which I think is Georgia's version, but the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement is the where the record with the state licensing body is for Texas. And that record follows you. It is the thing that is supposed to stop an officer from getting fired in one town and then hired in the next. But if you resign first, there's no discharge to report. And that's kind of like a loophole, I find, in the middle of American policing, and it has a name. People call it the wandering officer problem. I did not know this until I started researching and I thought this was very interesting. But The wondering officer problem is where you resign for termination. You keep your license clean and then you apply in the next county. Now, it didn't help Dean here because he got arrested. But it is the move, and he made it. And most of the time, it works. And Chief Krause said that Dean violated department policy on use of force, de-escalation, and unprofessional conduct. And Dean, you know this. This man also refused to cooperate with the investigation. No oral statement, no written statement, nothing. And now I do want to be fair about this because hey, hey, hey, it's his right, right? It's his right, okay? And I would tell anybody to use it. The Fifth Amendment belongs to him exactly like it belongs to you if you're in America. Nobody has to help build a case against themselves, okay? But I also want To hold that next to what we ask of everybody else, right? Because an ordinary person who shoots somebody and then says nothing to detectives is, in the public mind, best basically confessing. We treat silence as a guilt when a civilian does it. It did not read that way here. So he gets arrested on October 14th on a murder charge, and he posted a $200,000 bond and he was out in about three hours. In December 2019, a grand jury indicts him for murder. So then the state of Texas goes for murder. And on December 15th, 2022, the jury came back guilty of manslaughter. Not guilty of murder. And I'm going to explain exactly what that means because this is the whole case, and I don't find people breaking it down when I look up this case, okay? So in Texas, the difference between murder and manslaughter is not about what he did. Both of them are the same physical act. He fired, she died. The difference is the mental state. And now murder under Texas Penal Code Section nineteen point two is intentionally or knowingly causing death or intending serious bodily injury and committing an act clearly dangerous to human life that causes death. And now manslaughter under section nineteen point four is recklessly causing death and reckless is. Has a definition. It basically means you were aware of substantial and unjustifiable risk and you consciously disregarded it. So you knew the risk and you went in there and did it anyway. So here's the question that the jury actually had in front of them. When Aaron Deane fired through that window, did he know he was gonna kill whoever was behind it? Or did he consciously disregard a huge risk that he would? And now I think maybe you guys can see how twelve people get to reckless because okay, let's just take his defensible verdict somewhere, okay? He was a scared, badly trained, eighteen month officer with documented tunnel vision in a dark backyard at two thirty in the morning. So the state's own argument was essentially that he should have never been there where he was and he should have never fired, which is a devastating argument for recklessness and a harder one. For knowing, and I think that's a defensible verdict. I'ma say that out loud, even though it's not the satisfying thing to say for me, I'm not gonna lie to you. But the mechanism that let them do this is called a lesser included offense. So a lesser included offense is a crime made up entirely of elements that are already inside the bigger crime. Manslaughter, it sits underneath murder. Every manslaughter is contained inside of a murder charge, minus the mental state. So when the judge instructs the jury. They are told they can convict on the greater offense or on the lesser one or acquit entirely. It gives them a middle option. And now I want you to notice something because you heard me explain this exact mechanism in my episode about Bo. So when I talked about Bo, I mentioned that Amber Geiger was convicted of murder. And her whole appeal was an attempt to get reform down to criminally negligent homicide. And she warned the lesser included offense, and the court said no. However, here the jury went down to the lesser offense on its own. So it's interesting because we have the same doctrine. One defendant begged for it and lost, and the other got it handed to him by 12 people. And here's the part that is gonna sit badly, and it should. Because in Texas, murder is a first degree felony, five to ninety-nine years or life. Manslaughter is a second degree felony, two to twenty. So the moment the jury wrote manslaughter, the ceiling from life to twenty years before anybody had even said a word about the sentencing. And the verdict is the sentence before the sentence. Y'all know? So in Texas, in a case like this, the defendant can choose to have the jury assess punishment instead of the judge. I thought that was interesting, did not realize that till recently. So the same 12 people, because Dean decided to go with that choice and let the def the jury assess the punishment instead of the judge, the same 12 people who convicted him picked the number. And on December 20th, 2022, they came back with 11 years, 10 months, and 12 days. And if you guys are thinking it, you're right. This is not a normal sentence, right? Sentences come in round numbers. Ten years, fifteen, twenty-five. Nobody accidentally lands on eleven years, ten months, and twelve days. 10, 12, the 10th month, and the 12th day, October 12th, the night she died. And observers in that courtroom caught it immediately. And I have thought about what that number is, and I think it is two things at once, which is convenient for a show actually called Both Things Are True. Okay, crime. Would you claim? It's a message. I see this 12 people saying out loud in the only language a jury gets to speak that they know and they knew exactly what day it was, and they were not going to let the number be anonymous. Every time anybody reads that sentence for the rest of his life, her death date is in it. And it is also In a sentencing range that went up to twenty years about eleven, which is not the top, and it's barely past halfway. So they built her a monument out of a number that was not the number they could have given both things. And I have to say something about how long it took to get there because the delay is honestly its own story. She was killed in October 2019 and he was indicted in December 2019, but the trial didn't start to December 2022. Three years. And the record of that delay, it is a grind. They had a trial set for August 2021, then t January 2022, then May, then June. And then the defense, they asked for more time over attorney availability and then vacation plans. And there were two motions to change the venue, both denied. And then in June of 2022, the defense moved to get the judge removed, saying that he had become hostile and overbearing, and a different judge granted it. And then Judge Hagerman was off the case. And see. Some of this stuff is ordinary, some of it is a pandemic, some of it is a well funded funded defense, knowing exactly what a well funded defense does, which is to use every lever that exists. And I'm not mad at a defense lawyer for defending that's the job, right? But what I will say is that in those three years, a family sat. Her mother, Yolanda, the woman that Atiyana. Had moved in to take care of. She died in January of 2020, three months after her daughter was killed. She never saw a trial. Listen, delay is not neutral. It is a thing that happens to somebody. So now the second track. And this is the doctrine I want you to have the most because it governs almost every police case we're gonna ever watch, and most people have never had it explained. So In May of 2021, the family filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Dean and the city of Fort Worth. And so a criminal case, it punishes. A civil case, it compensates. Different parties, different standards, different rules. And in a federal civil rights suit against a government official, there is a doctrine sitting in the doorway called qualified immunity. And now, qualified immunity is not in the constitution, it's not in the statute, the Supreme Court. Is the one who built it. And here's how it works: when you sue a government official for violating your constitutional rights, the courts they have two questions for you. One, did the official violate a constitutional right? Two, was that right clearly established at the time? Now, if the answer to either one is no, then the official wins. The case is over, never reaches a jury. And prong two is the one that eats the cases. Because clearly established. Does not mean the right is in the Constitution. It means that a court in that jurisdiction has already ruled on facts close enough to yours that any reasonable officer would have known this specific conduct was illegal. So then the question becomes: Has a court already said in a case enough like this one that you cannot do this? And If nobody has ever sued over this exact scenario before, there is no prior case, which means the right was not clearly established, which means immunity. Isn't that interesting? Think about the loop on that. A thing is only clearly illegal if somebody already lost a case about it. And the first person it happens to has no case. So Dean argued that he was entitled to qualified immunity, but the district court said no, so then he appealed to the Fifth Circuit. And then on February twenty-fifth, two thousand twenty-five, the Fifth Circuit Court, they split it in half, which is very interesting. So we're gonna talk about it. Okay, so on an excessive force, the panel they ruled three to zero that Dean was not entitled to qualified immunity. Shooting a person in her own home through a window within seconds on these facts is not protected. So that claim survives. Now on the Fourth Amendment question of entering the cartilage, the panel ruled two to one that he was entitled to immunity. And Let's talk about this word because it is beautiful and it is about to be infuriating. Okay. Cartilage, if I'm saying that right, is the area immediately around your home. It is your porch, your yard right by the house, the space you actually live in, although it's outdoors. And the Fourth Amendment law it treats cartilage like the house itself. So you kind of get the same protection. And the Supreme Court held in Florida versus Jardines. If I'm saying that right. 2013 that bringing a drug dog onto somebody's front porch, that's a search. And then in Collins versus Virginia, 2018, that walking up to a driveway to a motorcycle by the house was a search as well. So you have this officer who walked into Atiana's Jefferson's backyard, right, at 2:30 in the morning without announcing himself. And that is the exact kind of intrusion intrusion cartilage doctrine exists for. And those two judges on that panel said that even if it was a violation, It was not clearly established enough on those specific facts that he loses immunity for it. One judge disagreed. And I want to be careful here because you know, I think the easy version is say that the court protected a cop, but I think the honest version is worse. I think that the judge has applied the rule correctly. I kind of think that the rule is the problem. Qualified immunity, from what I can tell, is built for a real reason, right? Which is that you don't want officials paralyzed by the fear of being personally sued for every judgment call. I don't think that that is a stupid concern. However, the way it was built means that the law can only ever catch up one dead person at a time. Because the right has to already be clearly established, which means somebody has to already have been hurt and close this exact way, got sued and got in a published opinion. And see, Atiana's family did not get to go forward on the backyard. They got to go forward on the shooting. And the next family in the next backyard now has an opinion on the book saying that this was not clearly established. Y'all see why I kinda feel like I have more problem with the rule than the judgment? So then this August it ended. On Tuesday, August 25th, 2026, the Fort Worth City Council, they voted unanimously to pay eleven and a quarter million dollars to the estate of Atiana Jefferson. And it is one of the largest payouts in the city's history per the city's own release, and it resolves all civil claims tied to her death. And let me tell you where the money goes because it tells you something. Her nephews, her two nephews, they got the largest portions held into the trust until they turned 18. The rest is split among other family members. It still has to be approved by a probate court before spinal. So as I'm talking about this, as I as I'm from aware of, I don't believe it's voted on and it's not yet closed. But now I want you to hold this net to what I told you, I think what about 10 minutes ago about qualified immunity. Because the two things I think actually explain each other. So the fifth circuit lets the excessive force claim go forward, right? This is the claim that says the shooting itself violated her rights and on that one dean had no immunity, three to nothing. So the city is looking at a trial. It could lose on the clearest, worst, most watchable fact in the case. And a man shoots a woman through her window in seconds. And the city that is looking at that writes the check. Which means the ruling that took away the backyard away from her family is also part of why they got paid for the shooting. The doctrine, it cut the case in half, and then the surviving half was strong enough to settle. And I'm not gonna call that justice. I'm not gonna call it anything. And there's another thing from this file I can't get past that happened this year. In June of 2026, the city of Fort Worth, they approved funds for Aaron Legal's defense in the family civil lawsuit. So while he's in jail for killing her, prison, my bad, prison for killing her, in a suit. Bought by people he took her from the city, paid for his lawyers. And I have that reporting from reporting rather than from the agenda itself. So you know what? Just hold it at that weight. But if it is right, then Fort Worth basically paid to defend him and then paid her family to make it stop. And that's just the way I'm seeing it. I could be wrong. But here is the thing to me that connects this episode to Bo. And it's not a theme, it's a name. S. Lee Merritt was co counsel for the Jefferson family on this settlement. Lee Merritt is also one of the attorneys for Bo's family. He's the one that I quoted in Bo's episode where I say the family never intended to blame Amber Geiger alone. So you have the same lawyer, both families, two cities thirteen months apart. And I did not put these requ I talk about these close to each other. Just because they're like rhymed or something, I put them next to each other and then found out that the same man has actually been in both rooms. There's another account attorney, John J. Coyle, and he said that the settlement represents an important measure of accountability. And he called the work of the Atiana Project the legacy we should celebrate. The Atiana Project is the thing her family built out of this. That is what the money's going towards, and that is what they. want attached to her name. And I am from now on, I am going to figure out a way how to do this. But from now on, every case, if there is anything for the victims, I'm going to make sure that I keep that updated and put into wherever I post that as well. but just a random thought. so also the mayor Maddie Parker she acknowledged the profound unimaginable loss and she hoped that the arrangement would offers a meaningful measure of closure. That's what the mayor said. But I have something I haven't been able to stop thinking about while I was building these episodes. Because in the in Bo's trial, the judge instructed the jury on the castle doctrine, if you guys recall, if you guys listened to that episode. And that was the principle where your home is your castle, and that you have no duty to retreat inside it, and that the law presumes your fear was reasonable when somebody is unlawfully entering. And do y'all remember that instruction went to Amber Geiger? The person who came through the door because she believed she was in her own apartment? And the man who was actually in his own castle eating ice cream got nothing from it? And now we're here. Atiana Jefferson in her own home. She hears a stranger in her yard in the middle of the night, and she picks up a gun she legally owned and legally carried in the one place in America where the law is most protective of doing exactly that. And she went out to look out her own window. She did everything the castle doctrine exists to protect. And being the person in the castle holding the gun, the castle doctrine says she can hold. Is what got her killed because a man outside says he saw a silhouette with a weapon. Stu. So here's the both things, and it's probably the ugliest one I've had on the show, right? Because the right to arm yourself in your own home is real and it is one of the most aggressively protected rights in this country. And Atiana Jefferson was exercising it correctly. And for a black woman at two thirty in the morning with a police officer outside her window exercising correctly. the thing that ended her. And I feel like a right you cannot use. It doesn't feel like the same right. Am I am I wrong with my right? I I do not feel like a right you cannot safely use. I don't feel like it's the same right. It's the same words, but it doesn't feel like the same right. And I'm just talking about feelings I could be wrong, but it doesn't. So where it all stands now, Dean, he appealed his conviction, as they all do. I'm gonna say that all the time, they all do. And in February 2024, the Second Court of Appeals in Texas, they upheld it. He asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to review it. And in May 2024, they said we ain't got it to do. No. In October of that year, the Supreme Court, they also said, We ain't got it to do. No. And the criminal case is finished. The conviction stands. And he is at Ramsey Unit in somewhere in Texas. And his parole, I can't say that word. Rosharin, Rosharon? Sorry guys if you're from there. his parole eligibility date is November 18th, 2028. And now listen, parole eligibility is not released. It is the date of a parole board is first allowed to look at you. and if you heard the Bose episode, you know exactly how much that distinct distinction matters. But I want to tell you what happened to the people around her. I don't want to end on him. Her mother Yolanda Carr, the woman she moved in to take care of her, she died in January 2020, three months after Atiana. Her father, Marquise Jefferson, died within the year. And her sister, Amber Carr, who is Zion's mother, has also since died as well. So that little boy in that room. He has lost his aunt, his grandfather, his grandmother, and his mother. And I'm gonna say that once and then stop. And I want you to notice that none of those deaths are anybody count. There's one name on the case and there are four more people gone in that house. And this is where her sister Ashley Carr comes in. Because when that settlement passed, she said the thing that I feel like I've been trying to say for a little bit and I'm not able to, okay? And she said it better not give ever. She said accountability has never been about a single verdict, sentence, or settlement. A verdict, a sentence with her death date inside of it, eleven and a quarter million dollars. This case got all three, which is almost more than most families in this country get. And the person closest to it says that was never what accountability meant. And I told you at the start that these two belong next to each other. And here's why I actually think so. Bo's name. You knew. Atiana Jefferson's name. Maybe you did. Maybe you did not. And 13 months is nothing. Same state, same thing. Both of them home. Both of them doing nothing. Both of them killed by somebody with a badge who should not have been in the room. And I'm not gonna pretend I know the whole reason one name traveled and the other one did not, but I notice it. Every time I notice it. Atiana Jefferson, she graduated from Xavier. She was pre-med. She worked in HR. She moved back home at 28 because her mother was sick and somebody had to do it. And she burnt some hamburgers on a Friday night and she opened up the doors so the house wouldn't smell. And she stayed up playing video games with an eight-year-old. She loved little Zion. And a neighbor called for help because he was just worried about it.