Killing of an airman by Florida deputy is among cases of Black people being shot in their homes

The fatal shooting of a U.S. Air Force pilot in his off-base apartment in the Florida Panhandle by a sheriff’s deputy is reminiscent of other examples of Black people being killed by law enforcement officers in their own homes as they went about their daily lives.

Senior Airman Roger Fortson, 23, was killed May 3 at his Fort Walton Beach apartment. The body camera video viewed by reporters Thursday shows the Okaloosa County sheriff’s deputy arriving at the apartment complex and speaking with a woman who described hearing someone arguing. The deputy then took the elevator upstairs and walked down an outside hallway.

In the body camera video, the deputy can be heard shouting that he was from the sheriff’s department and knocking, while also apparently stepping out of sight of the door. The video then shows Fortson opening the door with what appears to be a gun in his hand pointed toward the ground.

The deputy quickly fires several shots and yells for Fortson to drop the gun after he is already wounded on the ground.

Attorney Ben Crump, who represents Fortson’s family, has said Fortson was talking to his girlfriend via FaceTime and grabbed his gun because he heard someone outside his apartment.

Crump said in a statement Thursday that “we remain adamant” that police went to the wrong apartment. The sheriff rejects this claim.

Here are some other cases:

Botham Jean, a 26-year-old Black man, was fatally shot in 2018 by a white police officer who mistook his Dallas apartment for her own.

Amber Guyger was still in uniform after a long shift when she walked up to Jean’s apartment — which was on the fourth floor, directly above hers on the third — and found the door unlocked.

Jean, an accountant from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, had been eating a bowl of ice cream when Guyger entered his home and shot him. He was unarmed.

Guyger, the former officer, was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Atatiana Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman, was fatally shot through a window of her home in 2019 by Aaron Dean, a white officer, as he responded to a non-emergency call about the door of her home in Fort Worth, Texas. Open.

Body camera footage showed Dean and a second officer not identifying themselves as police at the home. Both testified at Dean’s trial that they believed the house may have been burglarized and that they quietly moved into the fenced backyard to look for signs of forced entry.

Jefferson and her then eight-year-old nephew, Zion Carr, were up late playing video games. They had left the doors open to release smoke after burning burgers earlier.

Carr testified that Jefferson grabbed her gun because she thought there was an intruder in the backyard. Dean fired a single shot through the window a split second after yelling at Jefferson, who was inside, to show her hands.

Dean was found guilty of manslaughter in 2022 and the former officer was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.

Aiyana Stanley-Jones, a 7-year-old black girl, was fatally shot in her family’s Detroit home in 2010 by police who burst into the wrong unit of a duplex while looking for a man suspected of a murder that had been committed days earlier. The suspect was eventually arrested in the second floor unit of the duplex.

Aiyana was shot in the head while she was sleeping on a couch.

Joseph Weekley, a member of an elite police unit, was the first officer through the door of her home. Weekley, who is white, said he accidentally fired his gun during a fight with Aiyana’s grandmother.

Weekley was charged with involuntary manslaughter, but his first trial ended without a verdict in 2013 and his second ended in 2015 with a hung jury. During the second trial, a judge dismissed that charge.

Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was killed in 2020 by police officers who opened the door of her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, while executing a search warrant that was later found to be flawed.

Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a single shot that hit one of the officers as they came through the apartment door, and the officers returned fire, hitting Taylor several times in the apartment’s hallway.

Walker told police investigators that he heard knocking but did not hear police announce themselves. He said he was “terrified,” so he grabbed his gun and when the door was smashed in, he fired a shot.

Officers found no drugs in Taylor’s apartment.

Former Louisville officer Brett Hankison, who is white, fired 10 shots into Taylor’s window and glass door, and was found not guilty in 2022 on state charges that he endangered her neighbors when he opened fire. Some of his shots flew into a neighboring apartment, but none hit anyone.

Last year, a jury deadlocked on federal civil rights charges that Hankison used excessive force that night. Federal prosecutors have said they plan to try him again.

Three other former officers involved in drafting the order were charged in a separate federal case. One of them, Kelly Goodlett, has pleaded guilty to helping forge the warrant. She is expected to testify against the other two in the upcoming trial.