Good Morning Everybody.
On early Sunday morning, in the middle of the night, a woman wrongly forced her way into the home of a 26 year old black man named Botham Jean, an immigrant from St. Lucia who worked as an analyst for Price Waterhouse Cooper, and served as a worship leader at his local church, and proceeded to shoot and kill him.
It was not her house.
She did not know the man.
He broke no laws.
Awakened from his bed by this stranger, he had no earthly idea who she was or what was going on. And she shot and killed him. She was not defending herself. He laid no hands on her and made no threats.
Let me pause right there.
In each and every circumstance what I just told you is illegal.
Botham Jean was murdered.
But his murderer, Amber Guyger, is a cop. And here’s the thing, and it’s important for me to break this down, because it’s a huge part of this case, an off-duty police officer is just a person. They don’t have privileges. They don’t have their own set of laws. Every law that applies to me and you applies to her.
That’s a fact. What’s also a fact is that because she’s a police officer, the Dallas Police Department and other local police departments are going to try to have her case treated very differently. Because here’s the thing, when a cop, who is on duty, uses force, and shoots and kills a person, a very different set of laws apply. They have unique protections.
But the moment you clock out, those protections cease to apply. And Amber Guyger, as well as the local police union, want to put her on the protective pipeline as if she shot and killed Botham Jean in the line of duty. She didn’t.
They want her to have preferential treatment on top of the deference that she is already going to get as a white woman in America. And for the next few moments I want to break down a few recent developments in this case.
First and foremost, Amber Guyger has clearly been coached by cops and attorneys to blatantly lie about what happened in this incident. We know this because her first statement, which more closely resembles the truth, is now wildly different from a false bogus statement that she just issued.
In her first statement, Amber Guyger told Dallas Police officers that she walked up to Botham Jean’s apartment, thinking that it was hers, and tried to unlock the door with her key fob, when it didn’t work, which it wouldn’t, because it’s an electronic lock that turns red when used on the key is used on the wrong door, she said she put down her bags and continued to try to unlock the door with her keys.
Two different neighbors have now come forward to say that they then heard Amber Guyger repeatedly yelling “Let me in. Let me in.”
Now that’s strange. She lives alone. She has a dog. Who did she think was going to let her in? The dog? Did she not notice the bright red welcome carpet that Botham’s mother purchased for him to put in front of the door?
Whatever the case, it appears that her knocking on the door and yelling caused Botham to get up to see what in the world the disturbance was about.
And here is where we begin seeing Amber Guyger telling blatant lies. In her new statement she says the door was open and she walked in on her own and that when she did she saw Botham, and told him to put his hands up, and that he didn’t comply, so she shot him.
But in her first statement, she said over & over again the door was locked, and that he came to the door and opened it, and then she shot him. Nobody in the building ever heard her say, “Put your hands up.” Nobody.
Her attorneys and police union reps have told her to say that because they want to create the image that she was an on duty cop following protocol and that a big scary black man disobeyed her orders. And that makes sense, because it was the police union that appears to have paid her bail. We’re also wondering if it was the police union who paid for the PR firm that is now representing Amber Guyger and trying to change the narrative here.
Let me close with this thought.
We have to fight like hell for justice in this case. It’s essential. We can’t the let the precedent get set that cops, at any moment, can be off duty and shoot and kill Black folk in their own home any time they feel like it. That can’t fly. Botham Jean was a brilliant, kind, compassionate soul, and we are going to fight for him, and for his family, every step of the way in this case.
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