But at her funeral on Thursday, Atatiana Jefferson’s family and friends honored her for what she had been to them in life: a hands-on aunt who took her nephews to arcades and playgrounds; a pet lover who could not say no to animals in need, even once adopting a wild rabbit; and a pillar of family life who, at 28 years old, put her own life on pause to move in with her sick mother.
“Whoever she really cared for, she went all in for it — people and animals,” her sister Ashley Carr said in an interview this week.
Filled with prayers, gospel music and calls for justice, Jefferson’s funeral was both a joyful celebration of her life and an emotional outcry against police abuses and racial profiling. The mayor of Fort Worth, the police chief and a large number of police officers looked on in silence as eulogists condemned the injustice of Jefferson’s death — she was a black woman shot by a white police officer in her own home — and criticized what they described as the failure of many police officers to protect and serve without regard to skin color.
“Many of us are tired of talking to our kids about the police,” said the Rev. Bryan L. Carter, the senior pastor of Concord Church in southwest Dallas, where the funeral took place. When he described how many people were tired of racial profiling, and of protesting to show that black lives indeed matter, several people stood up and applauded.
At one point during the funeral, a letter was read from Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., who expressed sympathy to Jefferson’s family and shock over the “outrageous injustice of her death.”
Carl B. Ming, a pastor for the Southwest Region Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, said in his eulogy that the mourners had assembled because of the “senseless acts of some incompetent folks,” but he urged them not to succumb to hate and divisions. “This is not a time to come up against each other,” he said.
The large number of officers — black, white and Hispanic — who attended the funeral did not seem to be there as part of any security detail, but rather to pay their respects.
But among the mourners, the Rev. Kyev Tatum, a Fort Worth pastor, said he and several other religious leaders were still asking the Justice Department to place the Fort Worth Police Department under federal oversight.
He recalled other times when black residents of Fort Worth had been killed or otherwise mistreated by the police. “We can grieve with dignity, but we still have to fight for justice,” he said. “The case in Fort Worth is our Montgomery moment.”
The funeral, originally scheduled for last weekend, was delayed until Thursday by a family dispute. Jefferson’s father, Marquis Jefferson, had argued in court that he should have the authority to make funeral and burial arrangements; he later came to a confidential agreement with Jefferson’s mother, Yolanda Carr, who has been mourning her daughter while hospitalized with health problems.
On Thursday, Jefferson announced that he planned to create a foundation in his daughter’s name to support the development of aspiring black doctors, address homelessness, reduce stress in impoverished communities and empower youth.
Jefferson’s mother was not able to attend the funeral on Thursday. In a letter that was read aloud, she recalled that her daughter had often said she was going to change the world. “You, my dear, have indeed changed the world by your sacrificial love, unbridled work ethic and enduring legacy that is yet to unfold,” she wrote.
Jefferson was shot from outside her bedroom window in the early hours of Oct. 12, after her neighbor had called a nonemergency police line and asked officers to check on the house. The neighbor had noticed that the doors were open, unusual for the middle of the night.
Jefferson was up late playing video games with her 8-year-old nephew. It had been a difficult week: Her mother was in the hospital, and her other sister, Amber Carr, was recovering from heart surgery. Jefferson, who often played disciplinarian to her nephew — teaching him how to mow the lawn and creating a structured schedule to help him get ready for school in the mornings — was playing the role of the fun aunt that night, staying up late to play Call of Duty with him.
When two officers responded to the neighbor’s call at around 2:30 a.m., they did not announce themselves as the police as they crept around the yard and peered into the house. When she heard noises outside, Jefferson grabbed a handgun from her purse and pointed it toward the bedroom window, her nephew told the police afterward.
When one of the officers, Aaron Y. Dean, approached the window and saw Jefferson inside, he shouted, “Put your hands up! Show me your hands!” Almost immediately, he fired a single fatal shot through the window. Dean, 34, later resigned from the department and was charged with murder.
Jefferson, known by her nickname Tay, was the youngest of what her family called the “A team” — four siblings whose given names all started with the letter A. She had big dreams, and worked hard to attend college at Xavier University of Louisiana, where she graduated in 2014 with a degree in biology. She hoped to one day become a doctor.
“She was part of the first generation of people in my family to go to college,” said Ashley Carr, 35, who lives in Houston and works as a budget analyst for the Houston Independent School District. “There were plenty of days of struggling, plenty of days of eating ramen noodles for dinner. But that wasn’t a deterrent for her.”
Recently, Jefferson had been selling medical equipment while studying and saving up to apply for medical school, Carr said. But after their mother got sick, Jefferson agreed to move away from Dallas, where she had been living with a roommate, to Fort Worth, where she moved in with their mother, their sister Amber Carr and Amber’s sons, who are 4 and 8.
Jefferson taught the 8-year-old how to dress himself in the mornings and get ready on time for school, and took the 4-year-old to an indoor playground for his birthday, where she showed him how to go down a slide, her family recalled. Their bond was so close, “sometimes people think that they are her kids and not mine,” Amber Carr said at a news conference earlier this month.
Ashley Carr, who does not have children of her own, recalled how she and Jefferson had bonded over their “fur babies,” which included Jefferson’s current brood of three cats and two dogs. The sisters also dabbled in following the stock market together. “We were like, ‘Did you see such and such went down today about 10 points?’” she said. The sisters had no money in the market, she said, “but it was just the point of, that was our camaraderie.”
Now, Ashley Carr has been left to make frequent trips to the house in Fort Worth where Jefferson was shot. She has been feeding and looking after Jefferson’s pets, including the dogs, Olive and Little Bit. She plans to take the pets back to Houston to stay with her.
“It’s so wrong,” she said. “Think about all the times you’re at home, sitting on the couch, watching Netflix, and you heard something. It could have been anybody. She wasn’t doing anything wrong. I can’t even say ‘wrong place, wrong time,’ because she was in her house.”
This article originally appeared in
.