DALLAS _ When Amber Guyger called 911 after shooting her neighbor last September, the off-duty Dallas police officer repeatedly told a 911 operator she made a mistake.
"I'm an off-duty officer. I thought I was in my apartment, and I shot a guy thinking it was my apartment," Guyger said moments after she fatally shot 26-year-old Botham Jean.
Jurors listened to that phone call on Tuesday morning, the second day of Guyger's murder trial.
Guyger, 31, was off-duty and still in uniform on Sept. 6, 2018, when she killed Jean at the apartment complex where they both lived near downtown. She has said she mistook Jean's apartment for her own that night and thought he was a burglar.
Audio from the 911 call was previously obtained by WFAA-TV (Channel 8), but Tuesday was the first time the call was officially released.
"I thought it was my apartment," Guyger said repeatedly through heavy breaths in the audio. "I could've sworn I parked on the third floor."
As the 911 call played, Jean's father Bertrum Jean put his arm around his wife Allison.
Jurors read a transcript as the called played, each simultaneously flipping the page as they followed along.
The family, including Jean's brother and sister, left before the body camera footage of Officer Michael Lee played in court. But Jean's teenage brother, Brandt, returned by the time the video was showed again. He sat with his chin in his hands as the video played as officers frantically tried to save his brother's life.
In the footage, Lee and another officer are seen running up stairs and through hallways in the South Side Flats building. Lead prosecutor Jason Hermus noted that even in the blurred footage, Jean's red door mat is visible.
Guyger briefly appears in the footage, saying she thought she was in her apartment as officers walk past her to Jean.
Inside Jean's apartment, the footage shows one officer performing CPR on him. He's in light-colored shorts and a dark T-shirt, lying on the floor.
Lee testified that light was emitted from Jean's TV and laptop. The footage shows a bowl on his ottoman and an ironing board and iron set up nearby.
Jean didn't open his eyes or otherwise communicate while officers tried to save his life, Lee said, but one officer felt a "faint pulse."
Hermus asked Lee about a hypothetical burglary situation, in which an officer came upon a burglary in progress and noticed someone inside a residence.
"You have two choices," Hermus said. "I want you to presume that you can safely tactively reposition to a position of cover and concealment. You have that option. Or you can just shoot them dead and worry about that later. What do you do?"
"Cover and concealment," Lee answered.
"Is that because of the sanctity of human life?" Hermus asked him.
"Yes, sir," Lee said.
Lee, in response to questions from Guyger's defense, said he was in the same police academy class as Guyger. He said she seemed "very emotional" the night of the shooting.
Robert Rogers, one of Guyger's defense attorneys, asked Lee if it was important to be able to see a suspect's hands to determine if they presented a deadly threat, and whether he would be prepared to use deadly force to protect himself if he walked into his home and believed an intruder was there.
Lee testified that he would.
Rogers also seemed to suggest that an officer might react differently to a perceived intruder if they were on-duty versus in their home.
"When you get a burglary call, you know that there's something has initiated a warning to you that there is a potential burglar in the location," he began a question to Lee. "So if you get to that location and there's an open door, you're already prepared for that?"
Lee agreed.
On Monday, the first day of the trial, defense attorneys cast the shooting as a tragic mistake. But prosecutors questioned how Guyger missed several visual cues that could have tipped her off that she was at the wrong apartment.
Jurors heard about how on the day of the shooting, she had exchanged sexually explicit text messages with her police partner Officer Martin Rivera, with whom she had a sexual relationship.
About four hours before the shooting, she texted Rivera that she was "super horny today," prosecutors said. About 30 minutes before the shooting, she Snapchatted him: "Wanna touch?"
The jury also learned that while Guyger was on the phone with a 911 dispatcher, just after the shooting, she had texted Rivera twice, and she had been on the phone with him while she drove home from her 13 {-hour shift at the police department.
Both Guyger and Rivera deleted the conversations from their phones, prosecutors said.
