The off-duty police officer who shot and killed an unarmed Black man in his own home last year in Dallas had been exchanging racy messages with her boyfriend in the minutes before the shooting took place, prosecutors said in opening arguments of the murder trial. They argued in part that those facts contradicted Amber Guyger‘s claim that she was exhausted when she entered Botham Jean‘s home and shot him to death because she said she thought he was a burglar.
Prosecutor Jason Hermus questioned how Guyger could be tired since he said the text messages suggest she was ready to meet her boyfriend for sex. After Guyger finished her 13 and a half hour shift, Hermus said the contents of the text messages show she did not have plans to go home and rest, which is what someone who was supposed to be exhausted would likely do after a long day at work. The text messages showed “she had plans,” Hermus said while reading from a transcript of the messages.
“When can I come over?” Martin Rivera, identified as the person Guyger was texting with, asked in his message.
“You can come over after this,” Guyger responded in an apparent allusion to her finishing up at work.
She then texted to Rivera: “super horny today too,” to which Rivera responded, “me too.”
That prompted Guyger to ask him in her next text: “Do you wanna touch?”
That exchange showed, Hermus argued, that Guyger had plans to have sex with Rivera. It also belied logic, Hermus said, since Guyger was supposed to be exhausted — the reason she blamed on entering Jean’s apartment, which was located exactly ne flor beneath hers.
The revelation was the first hint of what could have possibly been on Guyger’s mind when she did the unimaginable and shot Jean without any provocation.
Still, Hermus said, he understood how someone could be so tired they may miss clues that should have shown they were in the wrong place, including Jean’s bright red floormat — Guyger did not have one in front of her own apartment’s door — and the smell of marijuana in his apartment. What Hermus did not understand, he said, was how Guyger “departed in her [police] training” and did not follow protocol for such a situation.
Hermus cited her 911 call, which he said showed she was more concerned with her career than the life of a dying man.
READ MORE: Five Reasons To Believe Amber Guyger Will Be Acquitted
And after the shooting, Hermus told jurors how Guyger found the time to text Rivera once again instead of “giving 100 percent of her attention” to Jean, who can be heard gasping in agony during the 911 call. Guyger’s text to Rivera — “I fucked up” — showed “Amber Guyger thinking about herself,” Hermus said.
“She left that poor man alone in his apartment in his final moments,” Hermus said before saying that the rest of Guyger’s text messages were deleted off of her phone. “The state of Texas is entitled to a verdict of guilty.”
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