DALLAS _ Allison Jean last spoke to her son on Sept. 5, 2018 _ the day before he was killed.
On Tuesday, speaking to jurors who will decide the sentence for the former officer convicted of his murder, she described how she and her family have suffered since Botham Jean's death. Allison Jean goes to counseling and her younger son has become withdrawn, she said.
"I try to pray and fast and do all sorts of things just to help me get by," she said. "I have to try to keep the family together because everybody is in pain."
Jurors heard six days of testimony and deliberated for almost five hours before finding Amber Guyger guilty of murder Tuesday. The 31-year-old former Dallas police officer could face a sentence between five years and life in prison.
Guyger shot and killed Botham Jean inside his apartment in September 2018. She testified she mistook his apartment for her own and believed he was an intruder. She had just finished working a shift for the Dallas Police Department and was still in uniform when she shot Jean with her service weapon. The department fired her after the shooting.
The sentencing hearing started Tuesday afternoon with Allison Jean testifying. Shortly before 4:30 p.m., court adjourned for the day. The punishment phase of the trial will resume Wednesday.
Allison Jean described her son as someone with a passion for helping others who was dedicated to school, family and church in the United States and on Saint Lucia _ the island the family is from.
Botham Jean, as the middle child, tied his younger brother and older sister together, Allison Jean said. He was president of his student house in high school and started a school choir, Allison Jean said.
When Botham attended Harding University in Arkansas, he joined the choir and rugby team and brought classmates to St. Lucia for missionary work.
Alyssa Findley, Botham Jean's older sister, also took the stand. While listening to a video of Botham Jean singing, Findley put her head down.
When asked how it made her feel, she replied, "That I want my brother back."
Botham Jean's former boss, Kerry Ray, described Botham as someone with "unlimited" potential when he spoke Tuesday.
"A lot of people knew Bo, and anyone who knew Bo had a very high opinion of Bo," he said.
Allison Jean said the family started the Botham Jean Foundation, which continues missionary projects Botham worked on when he was alive.
After the hearing was called to a close for the day, the family's civil attorneys Lee Merritt, Ben Crump and Daryl Washington spoke outside the courtroom.
They said the guilty verdict was a victory, but noted that Jean's family will never be the same.
"Everybody in the family is just a shell of themselves," Crump said in the hallway outside the courtroom. "This is a victory, but don't think for one second that it has done anything to heal the hole in the heart of this grieving family."
In the first phase of the trial, jurors weighed whether Guyger, a white police officer, should be found guilty of murder, manslaughter or no crime at all in the shooting death of Jean, her 26-year-old unarmed black neighbor.
In the sentencing phase, state prosecutors exhibited several text message conversations from Guyger's cellphone in court Tuesday.
One conversation showed Guyger talking about working a Martin Luther King Jr. parade. She received a text asking when the parade would end.
"When MLK is dead ... Oh wait ... " Guyger replied in the text.
Another text conversation was with someone asking if she wanted a German Shepherd dog. The person wrote the dog "may be racist."
"It's okay ... I'm the same," Guyger texted back.
In a text message conversation between Gugyer and her partner, Dallas police Officer Martin Rivera, Rivera said he was in an area with five black officers.
"Not racist but damn," he texted.
Guyger replied, "Not racist but just have a different way of working and it shows."
The state also showed some of the posts Guyger saved on her Pinterest, one of which said, 'Stay low, go fast/ Kill first, die last/ One shot, one kill/ No luck, all skill." Another meme said, "People are so ungrateful. No one ever thanks me for having the patience not to kill them."
Pinterest is a social media network in which users can save posts and photos made by others.
In the courthouse, people responded to the guilty verdict with cheers, prayers and tears. Someone yelled, "Thank you, Jesus!" and people danced in the hallway outside the courtroom as a crowd celebrated. Jean's family embraced. Guyger sat alone, weeping, at the defense table.
Crump, speaking on behalf of the Jean family, said history was made with the verdict. He evoked the names of several people of color killed by police across the country.
"This verdict is for Trayvon Martin. It's for Michael Brown. It's for Sandra Bland. It's for Tamir Rice. It's for Eric Garner ... " said Crump, who represented Brown's family after the 18-year-old was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. "This verdict is for them."
The jury that convicted Guyger was largely made up of women and people of color.
"We still have the sentencing phase to go, but this is a huge victory not only for the family of Botham Jean but ... this is a victory for black people in America," Merritt said. "It's a signal that the tide is going to change here."
During closing arguments, Dallas County prosecutor Jason Hermus said he rejected the notion that it's reasonable for a trained Dallas police officer with five years of service to shoot an unarmed, innocent man in the chest.
Guyger's defense attorney Toby Shook said in his closing arguments that the law protects people in certain circumstances who make mistakes based on incorrect assumptions and that the state must rule out every possible reasonable doubt, or the jury must hand down a not guilty verdict. He said the shooting was a tragic mistake.
Prosecutors have said they didn't believe the Castle Doctrine should apply in this case because the law is designed to allow people to protect themselves in their own homes, and Guyger shot Jean in his apartment.
Prosecutors also argued that Jean was shot while he was sitting on the couch and perhaps trying to get up. He had been sitting in his living room eating ice cream. They also presented evidence that there was no blood on Guyger's clothing and the gloves she possessed were unsoiled, indicating she might not have given CPR to Jean.
Guyger testified that Jean was coming toward her when she fired her gun, and that she couldn't see his hands and didn't know if he was armed. She was afraid he was going to kill her, she said.
During cross-examination, when Guyger was asked whether she intended to kill Jean, she replied that she did.
