Chilling bodycam video shows Dallas cop Amber Guyger panicking after shooting black neighbor dead in his own apartment
Disturbing bodycam footage that was captured moments after a white Dallas cop shot dead her black neighbor in his own apartment was shown to the jurors at her trial on Tuesday.
The Dallas Police Department fired 31-year-old Amber Guyger last year in September, weeks after she shot and killed 26-year-old Botham Jean on September 6, 2018. Guyger said that she shot Jean because she entered his house mistaking it to be her own home and thought Jean was standing in her living room.
The video clip showed the aftermath of the deadly encounter as an officer attempted to give the victim CPR. The former police officer can be heard saying: "I thought it was my apartment."
The footage was recorded on the body camera of one of the officers responding to her 911 call. When her colleagues ask where Jean was struck with the bullet, she tells them: "Top left! Top left!"
The clip shows Officer Michael Lee administering chest compressions on Jean, who can be seen covered in blood, minutes before paramedics arrive at the scene. Meanwhile, Guyger can be seen panicking as she appears for a few seconds on the clip.
Officer Lee, in court, testified that, despite the CPR and paramedics' aid, Jean did not open his eyes or communicate with the first responders at the scene, according to the New York Post.
Prosecutors, during their opening statements on Monday, said that Jean was sitting in his living room eating a bowl of ice cream when Guyger entered his apartment and shot him while in uniform but off duty. The prosecutors argued that the former police officer should have noted that she was on the wrong floor.
The prosecuting side alleged that she did not notice that she was in the wrong house because she was distracted by a phone and text conversation with a colleague with whom she had been sexually intimate.
The defense lawyers, however, have insisted that Guyger fired in self-defense after mistakenly believing that she was in her home and Jean was a burglar.
The former officer reportedly told authorities that she had parked her car on the fourth floor of her garage, rather than the third floor where she lives. She found the apartment's door open and entered to find Jean inside.
In the first public revelation of the former officer's toxicology reports, Police Detective Eddie Ibarra, on Tuesday, testified that Guyger did not have any drugs or alcohol in her system at the time of the tragic incident.