Former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger leaves the 204th District Court for jail at the Frank Crowley Courts Building in Dallas, Texas on October 2, 2019.
Tom Fox/Pool via REUTERS
Joshua Brown, a key witness in the murder trial of a white Dallas police officer who fatally shot her black neighbor, was killed in a shooting Friday evening. Brown, 28, lived in the same apartment complex as the former police officer, Amber Guyger, and the unarmed black man, Botham Jean. Guyger walked into Jean’s apartment last year mistaking it for her own and killed the 26-year-old accountant who was inside. Brown, who lived across the hall from Jean, was shot multiple times by an unknown assailant 10 days after he testified in Guyger’s trial. Brown was killed in the parking lot of his current home, located around five miles from the apartment complex where Jean was killed.
“He bravely came forward to testify when others wouldn’t, ” Dallas County prosecutor Jason Hermus said. “If we had more people like him, we would have a better world.” During the trial, Brown testified he met Jean the day he was killed and recounted in tearful testimony Guyger’s actions immediately after she killed Jean. Lee Merritt, a civil rights attorney who represents the Jean family, described Brown as a “former athlete turned entrepreneur” and said his killing “underscores the reality of the black experience in America.” In a Facebook post, Merritt wrote that “Brown lived in constant fear that he could be the next victim of gun violence.”
Brown was killed two days after a jury sentenced Guyger to 10 years in prison, a sentence that angered Jean’s family and social justice advocates who noted it fell far short from the maximum 99 years that she could have received. Witnesses said they heard several gunshots and saw a car speed away from the parking lot of the apartment complex where Brown was found with multiple gunshot wounds. He died from his injuries at Parkland Memorial Hospital.
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