Atatiana Jefferson: 'Why I will no longer call the police' By Stephanie Hegarty
16 June 2020
James Smith has never wanted much to do with the police but he called them to check on his neighbour in the Texas city of Fort Worth, because it was late at night and her front door was wide open. Soon afterwards he heard a gunshot, and later saw the dead body of a 28-year-old woman, his neighbour's daughter, carried out on a stretcher. James Smith is angry, hurt and tired. Every death of a black person at the hands of a police officer takes him back to the moment in October when Atatiana Jefferson was killed. "I have to live with this guilt, with this cloud hanging over me for the rest of my years," he says. Because he was the reason that the police were there that night.
At around 02:30 on 12 October he was woken by his niece and nephew, who told him the front door of their neighbour's house was wide open and the lights were on. The owner of the house, Yolanda Carr, had a heart condition and had recently been in and out of intensive care, so Smith was worried something had happened to her. He went across the road and noticed the lawnmower and other gardening equipment were still plugged in, which he thought was strange.
So he dialled a number in the phone book to request a "wellness check" - expecting that a police officer would come out, knock on the door and check the family was OK. He didn't know that Carr was in hospital that night and that her daughter and grandson were up late playing video games.
Atatiana was saving up to study medicine. He was standing directly opposite the house when the police arrived. One of the officers, Aaron Dean, had his gun drawn as he approached the front door and then walked around the side of the house to the back garden. Seconds later there was a gunshot. "When that bullet went off I heard her spirit say, 'Don't let them get away with it,'" Smith says. "And that's pretty much why I stayed out there all night long until they brought her out." Police soon filled the street, but they wouldn't tell him what had happened. It wasn't until they wheeled a body out six hours later that he knew Yolanda Carr's daughter, Atatiana Jefferson, had been killed.
The two families were still getting to know each other. Yolanda Carr had bought the house four years earlier and was fiercely proud of it. Her house is separated from James Smith's by a road and their wide, green, manicured lawns. James Smith is reminded of Atatiana whenever he looks across the road Smith is a veteran of the neighbourhood. He's raised children and grandchildren there, and five members of his family still live on the same street. Keeping the yard straight is like a ritual in the area, he says, one that Atatiana's family had been quick to adopt. He describes Yolanda Carr as a hard-working lady. "She had some problems in life that she overcame and her home was her trophy."
Atatiana had been staying in the house while her mother was unwell. She was saving for medical school while caring for her mother and her eight-year-old nephew. A few days before the killing there had been a car crash on the street, James Smith remembers. Atatiana rushed out to help, and she stayed with the people in the car until the ambulance came. That was just her nature, he says. "She intended to become a doctor," he says, before going silent for a moment. "But that's not going to happen now."
Sometimes he would mow their lawn for them, Atatiana would bring him water and they'd chat. The day that she died she had been mowing the lawn herself, showing her nephew how to do it. On the footage from the officer's body cam, released after she was killed, officer Aaron Dean can be seen walking up to a window at the back of the house, where Atatiana briefly appears. "Put your hands up, show me your hands!" he shouts. He has barely finished speaking when he fires through the window. He never declared he was a police officer.
Aaron Dean resigned before he could be fired. He was quickly arrested and in December he was indicted for murder, but the trial has been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. Fort Worth police chief Ed Kraus said he "could not make sense" of why Atatiana Jefferson had to lose her life. In a press conference he seemed emotional as he spoke about the damage that her death had done to relations between the police and the community.
But James Smith doesn't find any of this reassuring. Atatiana's death has destroyed what little faith he had in law enforcement. "We don't have a relationship with the police because we don't trust the police," he says. "So if we can stay out of their way, we're fine." He's more reluctant than ever to call them. Recently, when his sister heard gunshots in the neighbourhood she asked him to call 911, but he refused. "It's an experience that unfortunately, you would have to be a person of colour to understand," he says. "I don't buy the police kneeling and hugging people, because we've been kneeling and hugging and praying for 60 years."
He doesn't feel that the case against Aaron Dean is being pursued properly. It troubles him that no-one from law enforcement has come to speak to him since the night of the shooting. It's his belief that if he hadn't spoken to the media the following morning, Atatiana's death might not have been investigated. He's also upset with the pace of the trial. "With the pandemic going on they said it could be 2021 before this thing starts. On the other hand, had it been a person or colour we'd be tried, convicted and have started our sentence already," he says. "We're still holding our breath. Pardon the phrase, but we can't breathe."
There are about 1,000 "officer-involved shootings" in which someone is killed every year in the US. These statistics are not centrally collected but various organisations and researchers have been compiling the data, mostly from media reports. According to one of these organisations, Mapping Police Violence, in 2019 black people represented 24% of those killed by police despite making up only 13% of the population.
Dr Philip Stinson of Bowling Green State University has also compiled an extensive database on police crime and, analysing cases where police have been arrested, has found that police crimes against black people tend to involve violence more often than police crimes against other races.
