DALLAS — Joshua Brown and Botham Shem Jean knew each other not by sight, but by sound — as muffled voices through their apartment walls.From the hallway outside his fourth-floor apartment, Brown could hear Jean, his neighbor across the way, sing gospel music and Drake lyrics. The two men, both in their mid-20s, had met but once. But just as their lives had fleetingly intertwined, so, too, have their sudden and violent deaths.Jean, 26, was murdered in his apartment at the South Side Flats complex last year by an off-duty Dallas police officer who claimed she had mistakenly entered the wrong unit and believed he was an intruder. Brown, 28, was gunned down last week, 10 days after he testified against the former officer. And the city of Dallas, still reeling with racial tensions in a case that stoked long-standing mistrust of the police, is once again full of questions.Brown was shot twice late Friday night outside a new apartment he had moved to in another part of the city. Witnesses saw a silver sedan speeding away from the scene, but authorities have not identified a suspect or a motive, and they have declined to talk about whether Brown’s death was in any way connected to the trial. Many African American community members and activists are renewing their call for someone outside the Dallas Police Department to conduct an independent investigation.The former officer, Amber R. Guyger, who is white, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing Jean, who was black and unarmed. Brown, who was also black, was killed two days after the jury trial came to a close.The timing of Brown’s death immediately led to public speculation about whether he was killed in retaliation for his testimony, or whether the trial, streamed live on the internet, had drawn potentially dangerous attention to him.”The testimony of Joshua Brown showed us a very good man — and one willing to testify in a controversial trial against the police,” said John Fullinwider, a founder of the Dallas activist group Mothers Against Police Brutality. “So the timing of his death and the multiple shots shook the city.”The latest shooting drew the attention of several Democratic presidential candidates, including Julian Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio, who called for transparency in the investigation. A Houston businessman and high-stakes poker player, Bill Perkins, is offering a $100,000 reward in the case. Mayor Eric Johnson of Dallas said he believed that the city’s Police Department would conduct a thorough investigation and asked for people to “refrain from speculation.”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.””It is critical to public confidence in the administration of justice that witnesses who speak out against police violence are fully protected,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the organization’s president, said in a statement. “The suspicious circumstances of Mr. Brown’s killing should cause great alarm and demand an immediate and piercing inquiry.”A witness to two murdersBrown was 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.In that encounter, Brown and his friends were leaving the club when he ran into another man who had a “personal issue” with him and wanted to fight, according to court documents. Gunshots erupted, killing Nicholas Diggs.Brown viewed a police photo lineup and identified the gunman and an accomplice. A suspect, Kendall Morris, was charged with murder and aggravated assault; he posted bond and was released pending trial.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.Members of the public had already expressed concern about the Police Department’s handling of the case after it was revealed that Guyger’s police partner, Martin Rivera, with whom she was having a relationship, had deleted text messages following the shooting. It also emerged that Mike Mata, president of the Dallas Police Association, instructed an officer to turn off a squad car camera on the night of Jean’s death so he could talk to Guyger privately, which officers said was standard procedure in officer-involved shootings.After the trial, Chief U. Renee Hall of the Dallas Police Department announced that she planned to open an internal affairs investigation.Merritt said evidence revealed during the trial had “eroded the trust of the community.””This investigation into the murder of Joshua Brown is going to be a critical point,” he said. “The city of Dallas can begin to either regain that trust, or create further division in the community.”This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2019 The New York Times Company
