‘She won’t be forgotten.’ Atatiana Jefferson’s neighbor, 1 year later, has new purpose
When James Smith steps outside to get some fresh air or to tend to his neatly manicured front lawn, the 63-year-old is taken back to Oct. 12, one year ago. The night his neighbor, Atatiana Jefferson, was shot and killed in her home by a Fort Worth police officer. The night he had requested a wellness check.
Smith can see clearly from his yard the white front and side doors on the one-story light blue home across East Allen Avenue. They’re the same doors he noticed were open late on that cool and breezy autumn night, setting in motion the killing that has long faded from the daily news cycle but is never more than a moment away from his mind.
It struck him as odd, he said, Jefferson, 28, would leave the doors open — he had never seen this before. Smith had once called a non-emergency number years earlier in regard to his aunt with her door open, so he decided to do it again. He watched as two officers crept around the house in the dark of night, more quietly than he had expected. About seven hours later he saw the coroner leave with Jefferson’s body.
Smith told the Star-Telegram that morning he felt responsibility for calling the police, even if it was former officer Aaron Dean and another unnamed officer who weren’t heard on bodycam videos identifying themselves, before Dean shot Jefferson through a window. She had been playing video games with her now-10-year-old nephew, Zion, when she got up to investigate a noise. Her mother, Yolanda Carr, the owner of the house, wasn’t there.
One year later, with the anniversary of her death on Monday, Smith say he still feels that burden of being the one who called. “I think about it going on 365 days,” he told the Star-Telegram last week, seated in a white plastic chair in his front yard. “It’s like I’m constantly reliving it.”
As yellow and green leaves twirled down from his sweetgum tree in the gusts of wind, Smith spoke about the trauma that continues to dominate his life, a pillow on his lap embroidered with a selfie of a smiling Jefferson. Birds chirped and hummed in the tree above, which will soon add three more colors to its leaves. The sun peeked through the branches.
“Normally, sitting in a yard on a fall day, looking at the leaves, listening to the birds, you would think that’s relaxing. But it’s not, because in the back of my mind — the incident,” Smith said. “I’ve lived on this street for 60 years. I will never feel happy on this street again.”
The retired mailman said though his doctor diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder, he hasn’t yet been to see a therapist. He was prescribed medications, but he doesn’t want his mind cloudy, or artificially cheery.
His sleeping continues to be inconsistent, he said, his mind racing in the middle of the night. He thinks not only of the incident but of the young neighbor lost, an Xavier University graduate with hopes of going to medical school to become a doctor. He remembers she once ran to help after a car hit a light pole, as if preparing for her future career.
Her death, he knows in his heart, may live in his mind for a long time.
It has also changed his direction and purpose in life forever.
Smith has become a regular face in the crowd at Fort Worth City Council meetings, pushing to keep alive both Jefferson’s memory and the calls for change that arose out of her death. Though he said he appreciates the city’s pledge to stop sending armed officers to wellness checks, he believes whoever responds has a responsibility to stay in contact with the caller. “I could’ve walked over there with them,” Smith said of the two responding officers last year.
His biggest undertaking over the past several months has been the 16 memorial street signs he hopes will grace stoplights along East Allen Avenue, from I-35 to the 1200 block with Jefferson’s home. He has renderings of what they will look like, brown with “Atatiana Jefferson” in white letters next to a Fort Worth longhorn logo.
He was coordinating with State Sen. Beverly Powell and State Rep. Nicole Collier, who serve Fort Worth, before the city council and departments of transportation and public works took over the project. He has collected signatures in the selected corridor over the past several months, gaining momentum. Almost 2,500 people have signed onto his Change.org petition.
The proposed signage is on the agenda for the city council’s next meeting on Oct. 20, according to City Councilwoman Kelly Allen Gray, of District 8, where East Allen Avenue lies. She expects the measure to pass.
Jefferson, she said, fits the description of a fallen citizen who has made extraordinary contributions to the city.
“There had been this undercurrent that was bubbling and brewing, and her death is what erupted the volcano,” Gray said over the phone Friday morning. “It really and truly got us moving in a direction of talking about injustices — racial injustice, social injustice, economic injustice. And how do we move our city forward?”
Smith estimates it will then take another four or six months to get the signs up.
He hopes they can remind drivers from Texas and beyond of Jefferson’s continuing legacy, or even make them look up the case for the first time.
“As they come through here, there’s something to take back home with you,” Smith said. “I want her remembered.”
‘Don’t let them get away with it’
Smith has been a resident of East Allen Avenue since he was born, when his mother lived with his grandmother. He remembers his mom got a job at the post office a few years later that allowed them to move, and he got excited, wondering when the big truck would show up. His mother told him they didn’t need one — they were staying on the block.
It became a trend in their family to live on the street, first with their aunt moving in with his young cousins he would run up and down the block with. Years later his brother and his sister moved into houses on the street too.
He never wanted to leave the “best spot in Fort Worth,” with its openness and its calm. So he bought a home about 10 houses down from the one where his grandmother lived.
He has seen families, and homes, come and go over the decades on the winding block. The property across the street was a vacant lot before developers built a new home about four years ago for Carr and Jefferson to move into. Zion would often walk across the street to play with Smith’s grandchildren.
There was one time, he remembers, when Jefferson bought a new lawn mower so she could both cut their yard and show Zion how to complete the task. The enraptured child would trail behind her, mimicking what she was doing.
When Smith would cut his own lawn, Zion came up to him with a bottle of cold water, at his aunt’s behest.
“Every time I cut that yard, I’m waiting on my bottle of water,” Smith said. “That I’m not going to get.”
The simple joys he used to feel living on the block have vanished in the wake of Jefferson’s death, and the tragic following months that compounded his pain.
His brother was recovering from a stroke before Jefferson’s Oct. 12 death, he said, and in December he passed. Jefferson’s mother, Yolanda Carr, then died in January of congestive heart failure in their home, as Smith watched the paramedics try to save her for 45 minutes. Her daughters — Jefferson’s sisters, who live in Houston and Mesquite, respectively — were on the phone with him.
He’s been cutting their lawn and getting their mail ever since then, staying in close contact with the sisters as he takes on the role of the house’s watchful protector.
His newfound advocacy in Fort Worth, he said, was motivated in part by some words that came into his mind after he heard the pop that ended up being the fatal gunshot on Oct. 12. He believes it was Jefferson, talking to him.
“When I heard that bullet, the next sound I heard was, ‘Don’t let them get away with it,’” Smith said.
He has been adamant, on Facebook and at council meetings, there have been too many delays in the case against Dean, who has been indicted on a murder charge but has been out on bond since Oct. 14 of last year. There were three pre-trial hearings between December and April, and then the case was pushed back due to COVID. But even before that time, Smith said, the court was trudging along too slowly.
Instead of setting an example for the country with the case, months passed with no updates, Smith said. He and the sisters say they weren’t told by officials with the District Attorney’s Office when there would be hearings, leaving them to learn on their own through news updates.
Smith went to the first meeting in Tarrant County Court, which Jefferson’s sister who lives in Mesquite missed because she didn’t know about it. He and the sisters later told an official with the DA’s office about their frustrations, he said.
“I let him know any time Mr. Dean comes to court, the sisters of the family should be notified,” he said. “Any time he comes to the court is important, no matter how long he’s coming.”
It was also upsetting, he said, to see few people in the benches at the hearing, perhaps because of the lack of awareness. He stepped into the hallway to check the room number, unsure he was in the right place.
With every subsequent police shooting or in-custody death that has happened across the country, from Breonna Taylor, to George Floyd, to Jacob Blake, he mulls over the similarities and the differences. And he thinks about where Dean’s case is at.
“Fort Worth had the opportunity to set the stage for the nation and the state, I’m not going to say by doing the right thing,” Smith said, before clarifying, “I will say by doing the right thing. Had the right thing been done in this case, it may have prevented a shooting somewhere else.”
His main source of hope is in the fact that, even though less attention has been paid to Jefferson’s case in recent months, it’s still on the minds of Fort Worth residents.
As he has walked from home to home in pursuit of signatures, he said, people have expressed interest in what was happening with the case, and their support for the new street signs.
They reassured him, even after all this time, he did nothing wrong that night.
“I hear that,” Smith said. “I’m still processing — Did I do the right thing?”
‘She won’t be forgotten’
Whatever peace Smith says he can find in the future will come in the changes that come out of his neighbor’s killing.
He would like to look out from his yard and see Jefferson’s memorial signs, an acknowledgment to him that her life mattered. He also hopes to watch the Carr home turn into its planned nonprofit center for the Atatiana Project, focused on getting kids in the community involved in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. His neighbor, he said, was always a bit of a “computer geek.”
This will be the most positive use for the home, now empty with bouquets of flowers up front, that will be forever linked to the shooting one year ago, Smith said.
Even though Carr’s house is a daily reminder to Smith of the night that may define the rest of his life, he has never considered leaving. He couldn’t.
“I’ve lived here 60 years, from a year old to now,” Smith said. “It would still be the same. I would carry this with me.”
It used to be a joy for him to sit on the swinging seat on his front porch, looking out on his boxwood shrubs, red tip roses and holly bushes. Now, he’s moved a chair into his slightly less tidy backyard, with its long grass and overgrown cacti plant. He plans to soon begin some yard work, in the hopes of making this a new more peaceful spot for solitude.
The Army veteran, who joined the reserves after high school, knows he’s a different man today than one year ago. Though he says supports law enforcement, he acknowledges he’s less likely to call police for help, and more critical of the system that used to bring him comfort.
This past month he stopped lifting his hand to his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance before city council meetings. “I analyzed the pledge that I was pledging, ‘With liberty and justice for all,’” Smith said.
“I can’t say the Pledge of Allegiance,” he said. “Because I don’t see the liberty and justice for all.”
Part of getting closure will be ensuring in the months and the years ahead “she won’t be forgotten,” he said.
The other part will be seeing a resolution to the Dean case. Whatever the outcome may be.
“I won’t be able to move forward until justice is done,” Smith said. “I can’t get closure until there’s closure, either way.”
This story was originally published October 11, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
