US policewoman enters wrong flat, shoots African American man
CHICAGO: A white Texas police officer who entered an apartment mistaking it for her own and shot dead the black man who lived there was arrested on manslaughter charges.
Officer Amber Guyger with the Dallas Police Department was arrested Sunday and booked into the county jail, the Texas Department of Public Safety said.
At the end of her shift and still in uniform, Guyger entered the apartment in a complex near downtown Dallas late Thursday and shot a man who she thought was an intruder, police said.
Minutes after the shooting, she called emergency services and told responding officers that she thought she had entered her own apartment. The victim, an African-American, was identified as Mr Botham Shem Jean, 26, an immigrant from the Caribbean island nation of Saint Lucia.
Mr Jean had graduated from a private Christian college in the state of Arkansas in 2016 and had since been working at the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in Dallas.
According to the Dallas Morning News, Guyger got off on the wrong floor of the building complex and approached an apartment exactly one floor above her own.
The door was unlocked and the lights were off and when Guyger saw a figure moving in the dark she pulled out her pistol and opened fire, the newspaper reported.
The Dallas-Fort Worth NBC affiliate reported that Guyger was released late Sunday on a $300,000 bail.- AFP
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