Texas officer testifies he saw gun before fatal shooting

A former Texas police officer testified in his murder trial Monday that he made mistakes but fatally shot a Black woman through a rear window of her home in 2019 while staring down the barrel of a handgun she was pointing at him.

Aaron Dean said Atatiana Jefferson had the gun “pointed directly at me” but repeatedly acknowledged his actions were "bad police work" on the fourth day of his trial in the killing the 28-year-old woman. It was Dean’s first public statement in the more than three years since the white Fort Worth officer shot Jefferson while responding to a call about an open front door.

“I was looking right down the barrel of the gun and when I saw the barrel of that gun pointed at me. I fired a single shot from my duty weapon,” Dean said on the witness stand.

On cross examination, Dean, now 38, acknowledged that he didn't say he was police nor mention the gun before shooting and also didn't tell another officer about the weapon before they moved into the house.

Running through events, prosecutors repeatedly asked if his actions were “more bad police work.” Again and again, Dean said, “yes."

The Fort Worth Police Department released body-camera video and arrested Dean on a murder charge within days of the Oct. 12, 2019 shooting. He'd completed the police academy the year before and quit the force without speaking to investigators.

Since then, Dean's case was repeatedly postponed amid lawyerly wrangling, the terminal illness of Dean’s lead attorney and the COVID-19 pandemic. Tarrant County prosecutors rested their case Wednesday after about two and a half days of testimony.

Dean shot Jefferson 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...