The slaying of Joshua Brown, a neighbor who had heard gunshots on the night last year when 26-year-old Botham Shem Jean was killed across the hall from his apartment at the hands of a white police officer, rattled many in Dallas and around the country who had followed this month’s high-profile trial. There was speculation that he had been killed in retaliation, or that perhaps the trial had brought him dangerous publicity.
But on Tuesday, the Dallas Police Department offered a far different explanation: Brown, 28, was killed during a drug deal, they said, and detectives were pursuing capital murder charges against three suspects. One of the suspects was in custody, and the others were at large, police said.
“There has been speculation and rumors that have been shared by community leaders claiming that Mr. Brown’s death was related to the Amber Guyger trial and that somehow the Dallas Police Department was responsible,” Avery Moore, an assistant chief who oversees criminal investigations, said at a news conference. “I assure that is simply not true.”
Brown, who like Jean is black, found himself in the public eye after he became a witness in the case against Amber R. Guyger, an off-duty police officer who shot Jean in his own apartment. Guyger, who lived downstairs at the South Side Flats apartment complex in Dallas, claimed she mistook the apartment for her own and Jean for an intruder. Brown testified for the prosecution at her murder trial, and she was sentenced to 10 years in prison last week.
Brown was shot late Friday night, two days after the trial came to a close. He was found gunned down outside a new apartment he had moved to in another part of the city, where witnesses had seen a silver sedan speeding away from the scene.
The timing of Brown’s death immediately led to public speculation and attention. Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and a Democratic candidate for president, called for transparency in the investigation. A Houston businessman and high-stakes poker player, Bill Perkins, offered a $100,000 reward in the case. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund called for an independent state or federal investigation into Brown’s killing, calling it a “deeply alarming and highly suspicious murder.”
At the news conference Tuesday, Moore sought to allay concerns and restore the public’s confidence. “I thank you for trusting us to provide you with true and accurate information,” he said.
The police identified three men who they said had traveled from Louisiana to buy drugs from Brown and got into an altercation in the parking lot. One of the men, Jacquerious Mitchell, told police that Brown shot him in the chest, and that afterward, he heard two more gunshots.
The police said Mitchell, 20, was in custody at a hospital and faced a charge of capital murder. Authorities had also issued warrants for two other men, Thaddeous Charles Green, 22, and Michael Diaz Mitchell, 32, who were still at large.
A witness to two murders
Brown had been a witness in not one but two murders last year in Dallas.
In November 2018, more than two months after the shooting of Jean, Brown was shot in the foot during a shooting outside a strip club that left another man dead.
Brown believed he had been the intended target in that shooting, so he kept a low profile in the months that followed. He only reluctantly agreed to testify for the prosecution at Guyger’s trial, according to a civil rights lawyer who represented Jean’s family and who is now working with Brown’s relatives.
“He didn’t want any part of this trial,” said the lawyer, Lee Merritt. “He was intimidated by the idea of being out there in the public. And unfortunately, in the black community, cooperating with the state — even in the prosecution of a white police officer — is frowned upon.”
When Brown took the witness stand on Sept. 24, the second day of the trial, he was worried about being in the public eye, Merritt said. Perhaps in a sign of his reluctance to testify, Brown was not exactly dressed for court: He wore blue athletic shorts and a mint-green graphic T-shirt, which he used to wipe his eyes occasionally as he spoke about his former neighbor.
‘Two voices mixing together’
Brown and Jean were in some ways living parallel but separate lives across the hall from each other at the South Side Flats.
Brown was from Florida and managed Airbnb locations; Jean was from the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia and worked for a major accounting firm. The night Jean was killed, they had separately made plans to spend the evening the same way — watching the first NFL game of the season, when the Philadelphia Eagles played the Atlanta Falcons.
Brown told the jury he had met Jean for the first time earlier on the day of the shooting, when officials from the leasing office came by to knock on their doors about a noise complaint.
Later that night, after going to a bar to watch the first half of the football game, Brown said, he came home to a commotion in the hallway. He heard something “like two voices mixing together at the same time,” he told the jury during the trial, followed by gunshots.
Crucially, he said he did not hear loud verbal commands before the gunshots, which was contrary to Guyger’s testimony that she had ordered Jean to show his hands before she pulled the trigger.
Later, from his balcony, Brown said, he could see Guyger pacing while crying on the phone.
“She was crying, explaining what happened, what she thought happened, saying she went into the wrong apartment,” he said.
Brown was raised in a military family who moved from city to city, including stints in Jacksonville, Florida, and Lancaster, Texas, outside of Dallas, according to Merritt. He played football at the University of South Florida, where former colleagues remembered him as a competitive and outspoken player with a love of video games, according to The Tampa Bay Times.
After college, he worked as a roofing contractor for a few years before starting a business renting out residences for Airbnb. He acknowledged during his testimony that he had previously had run-ins with the police, including a 2011 misdemeanor theft conviction and a 2016 drug conviction.
This article originally appeared in
.