Two months after that, a grand jury raised the manslaughter charge to murder. Later that month, she was dismissed from the police department. Booked into the Kaufman County jail, she was freed on $300,000 bail the same day. Three days later, she turned herself in to authorities on a manslaughter charge. Jean seemed to demand its own, even more disturbing version: being at home while black. The racial profiling of black men and women by white police officers put new phrases into the American vocabulary-driving while black, walking while black, shopping while black.
In a New York Times story about the incident, the reporters Manny Fernandez and Marina Trahan Martinez noted: She later said that she had accidentally entered the wrong apartment, mistaking Jean, who was Black, for an intruder in her home. Guyger lived in the apartment directly below Jean’s. The stranger was an off-duty police officer, a white woman named Amber Guyger. Before the ice cream began to melt, a stranger barged in, yelled, “Let me see your hands,” then shot him dead. Without locking his apartment door, he changed into shorts and a T-shirt, served himself two scoops of vanilla ice cream, and settled onto his couch to watch a football game. One night in September 2018, in a gentrifying neighborhood just south of downtown Dallas, a twenty-six-year-old accountant named Botham Jean came home from work.
