Atatiana Jefferson’s neighbors: Aaron Dean’s lawyers defamed historic FW community

Newly built houses are nestled among older, some dilapidated, homes on East Allen Avenue. Some lawns are manicured while others are unkempt. “It’s not what you think it is,” Annie Rico, 36, said of her neighborhood. Rico’s home is adjacent to the fenced-in backyard where a former Fort Worth police officer fired a lethal shot, killing a young Black woman, Atatiana Jefferson, more than three years ago. Rico said the area’s “look” contributes to the mischaracterization — played up by the ex-cop’s lawyers at his trial — that it is unsafe. Aaron Dean’s attorneys defamed the quiet, family neighborhood, residents say, when they called it rough and prone to crime. Rico said she never had problems here, and neither did Jefferson — until Dean killed her inside her mother’s home. Jefferson was 28 and an aspiring doctor.

Dean, 38, was sentenced Tuesday to nearly 12 years in prison for manslaughter. He was called to the home after a neighbor noticed lights on and doors open in the early morning hours of Oct. 12, 2019. Dean and a fellow officer testified the home appeared ransacked and they believed it had been burglarized. They did not announce their presence in case a burglar was inside, according to testimony, before walking around the back of the house. Dean spotted Jefferson through the window, yelled commands and fired within less than a second. Carol Darch, the officer with Dean that night, said the predominantly Black neighborhood was victimized by property and drug-related crimes. Prosecutor Ashlea Deener told jurors Dean was a “power-hungry” officer with tunnel vision who had a “preconceived notion” that it was a neighborhood plagued by crime. Lee Merritt, a civil rights attorney representing Jefferson’s family, said at a news conference Tuesday evening that “when the court referred to this community as a ‘rough community’ it was a euphemism for ‘Black community.’ ” “Because those two words are often used interchangeably — a Black community or a problem or troubled community — then we allow certain forms of policing that are a lot more militant and a lot more deadly than we do in other communities,” he said. “And so that’s a part of the key problem here, that we need to stop classifying communities that are predominantly Black as inherently dangerous.”