A little over four years after Zion Carr witnessed a Fort Worth, Texas, police officer fatally shoot his aunt in the boy’s grandmother’s home, the city has approved a $3.5 million settlement to be given to his guardians for his current care and to be placed in a savings plan to set up for his college education and his adult life.
The young boy will receive a lump sum first, a college package and annuity payments until he turns 40.
The announcement was made Tuesday, Nov. 28, by the Fort Worth City Council, the governing body that approved the award.
Zion, who was 8 years old when ex-cop Aaron Dean shot Atatiana Jefferson, a 28-year-old Black woman, testified during a 2022 trial that the officer fired into Jefferson’s mother’s home through a window in the early hours of Oct. 12, 2019.
Police had arrived at her residence after a neighbor noticed her door was open. The boy and his aunt were having a family night, playing video games and preparing food. Carr was cooking when the burgers were burned, prompting them to open the doors to help vent out the smoke.
Dean was one of the two officers who responded and never announced themselves at the front door. Instead, they walked the perimeter of the residence, causing Jefferson to become suspicious when she heard something. When Jefferson armed herself and approached the window to investigate the sound of rustling from outside, Dean hastily shot her. He claimed that he saw her with a weapon.
However, prosecutors argue that both the evidence and testimony suggest a different sequence of events. Body camera footage revealed the officer instructing her to raise her hands, but he failed to identify himself as a police officer before firing a single shot through the window, killing her in front of her nephew.
Zion stated during the testimony that Jefferson retrieved her firearm, believing there was an intruder in the backyard.
Dean was convicted last December by a Tarrant County jury of manslaughter and sentenced to 11 years and 10 months for her death.
The neighbor, James Smith, who made the non-emergency welfare check call to 911, was present at the sentencing hearing, wearing a button with Jefferson’s face on it.
“This button is a reflection of a vision in my mind that will probably never leave. You can’t see it, but that’s why I wear the button. So, she can be seen and remembered in the city of Fort Worth,” Smith said, according to WFAA.
The settlement came on what would have been Jefferson’s 33rd birthday, according to an Instagram post by the family’s attorney, Lee Merritt.
Justin Moore, the other attorney who worked on the case, reflected on taking Zion and his mother to the Tarrant County district attorney’s office for the first time.
“When I met Zion he was just barely in elementary school- understanding partially the full weight of what happened to him and to his Aunt Atatiana,” he captioned on his Instagram. “The times I’ve seen Zion since he’s maintained some of his boyish innocence, but you can tell what he experienced changed his life in an extremely devastating fashion.”
In reference to the settlement, he wrote, “Although money won’t make him whole, hopefully this accelerates him forward through the trauma and grief he will continue to heal from.”
Zion has experienced a significant amount of trauma in his short life. Apart from witnessing his aunt being shot, his mother, Amber Carr, passed away in January 2023, just a month after he testified at Dean’s trial to seek justice for his aunt. She had been battling congestive heart failure.
