Evidence from Botham Jean’s apartment supports Dallas officer Amber Guyger’s account that she shot Jean from across the room as she stood inside his apartment door, the Dallas Morning News reports. The evidence doesn’t conclusively show whether the door was unlocked or ajar. “We just don’t know,” said a law enforcement official. Jean’s family does not believe he would have left the door open. Police also found two spent cartridge casings and 10.4 grams of marijuana in the apartment. Guyger, who lives directly below Jean, shot and killed him around 10 p.m. Sept. 6 after she says she drove to the wrong level of the parking garage and mistook his apartment for her own. Guyger said the door was ajar and that she thought Jean was an intruder.
Jean’s death has prompted protests in Dallas about the shooting of a black man in his own home by a white police officer who shouldn’t have been there. Guyger was charged Sunday with manslaughter. Critics of the investigation say affidavits by the Dallas Police Department and the Texas Rangers, which took over the investigation, offer conflicting accounts, an indication that Guyger’s account changed. Guyger said the apartment was dark and that when she saw “a large silhouette,” she thought she was being burglarized, the arrest warrant affidavit says. She said she drew her gun, “gave verbal commands that were ignored” by the man she took to be a burglar and fired twice, investigators wrote. An attorney for Jean’s family, Lee Merritt, said two independent witnesses have come forward to say they heard knocking on the door in the hallway before the shooting. Merritt said one witness reported hearing a woman’s voice saying, “Let me in, let me in.” Then they heard gunshots.