Manny Fernandez and Sarah Mervosh

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

For Fort Worth Police Victim, a Funeral Full of Grief and Calls for Justice

DALLAS — In death, she became a national symbol: a rallying cry for police accountability and a reminder of the long-fraught relationship between black residents and the Fort Worth Police Department.

“I never thought I’d go through it a second time,” said Hann, 81, who moved back into his rebuilt home 15 months ago. “It was 31 inches of water in Harvey. And this one right here has got to be at least 40 inches.”

Across southeast Texas, residents called the deluge Harvey 2.0.

From Houston to Galveston, Tropical Depression Imelda soaked this patch of the state for much of the week. It intensified Thursday near Beaumont, Texas, and surrounding rural towns, with severe flooding that shut down highways, left hundreds of residents stranded and reflected some of the highest rainfall totals in the region since Hurricane Harvey in August 2017.

The city of Beaumont was pummeled with nearly 25 inches of rain. In southwestern parts of the city and into Jefferson County, almost 42 inches were recorded this week, with much of it coming in the last 24 hours, the National Weather Service said Thursday. Chambers County — which includes Hann’s town, Winnie — received 36 inches of rain this week, local officials said.

Gov. Greg Abbott declared a state of disaster in 13 counties, including Chambers County, Beaumont’s Jefferson County and Houston’s Harris County.

More than 1,000 people were rescued in Harris County, the county judge, Lina Hidalgo, said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.

In nearby Orange County, officials said at least 400 high-water rescues were made, most in the hard-hit Vidor area across the Neches River from Beaumont.

Nearly 140 people from Winnie and other Chambers County towns were staying at the American Red Cross shelter in Anahuac, Texas, after authorities and volunteers rescued them by boat, high-water rescue vehicles and, at times, a dump truck.

Vehicles were abandoned in the ditches of country roads nearby. A hospital evacuated some patients but remained open, with employees trudging barefoot across the sopping floor to treat the patients who remained. Residents said they had seen cattle in flooded fields, their noses poking out from under the water.

At least 800 houses and businesses were flooded in Chambers County, and officials rescued at least 300 people Thursday, as well as a few dozen dogs, cats and horses. The officials said rescues were complicated by the swift-moving floodwaters that shut down parts of Interstate 10 and turned rural ranches and country roads into lakes.

“A lot of people are getting flooded in their cars,” said Ryan Holzaepfel, the fire marshal in Chambers County. “They think they can drive through the water, but it’s deeper than they think.”

In Beaumont, drivers were inundated as the water around them reached as high as their door handles. Exxon Mobil shut down its chemical plant in the city and was closely monitoring its refinery on the same site. The Beaumont Police Department said it had been overwhelmed with calls, fielding nearly 600 requests for assistance by Thursday morning.

In some ways, there was no comparison between Harvey and Imelda. Imelda came nowhere close to the widespread scale and devastation wrought by Harvey, ranked as one of the costliest hurricanes in the U.S., second only to Hurricane Katrina, and the cause of dozens of deaths. It also battered a wider region, lingering for days as a tropical storm and dropping more than 50 inches of rain in some areas, while Imelda’s heaviest rains have come in more isolated pockets.

But for those in Beaumont, Winnie and other nearby towns, Imelda felt like a sequel.

In certain areas of southeast Texas, it was “higher water than Harvey,” said Holzaepfel, the fire marshal. “It’s flooding homes that did not flood through Harvey.”

On Thursday, there were limited reports of deaths and injuries. A young man drowned after being electrocuted while trying to move his horse, his family said. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office said on Twitter that another man had been extracted from a submerged van and was pronounced dead.

During Harvey, deadly flooding in Beaumont shut off running water and nearly turned the city of 120,000 into an island. Carla Cruz, 23, remembers it all too well. She remembers how water flowed through her home on Calder Avenue, how it took more than a year to replace the furniture, and how she couldn’t drink the tap water or shower in the house for two weeks after the storm.

On Thursday, her dog began howling around 4 a.m. Cruz woke up and swung her feet out of bed to see what was wrong. When her feet hit the floor, she felt the cold water and heard a splash. Her heart sank.

“It was too late for us to try to save furniture and clothes,” she said. As Cruz and her family grabbed a few belongings, the water rose to their knees. When they stepped outside, it was to her waist.

“Outside my house, it was basically like a lake,” said the Beaumont native. Her car was filled with water.

Cruz, a server at an Italian restaurant, said city residents live with “a little PTSD.” They exchange nervous glances whenever it rains for more than an hour.

On Thursday, that sense of panic resurfaced for many.

“I know it’s weather and we can’t control it,” she said, “but we went through this already.”

As in Harvey, people in the area were stranded, unable to check on the condition of their homes because the roads were impassable. Many, like Jody Chesson, stayed with friends, in shelters or at hotels.

Chesson, 53, an operator at the Goodyear chemical plant in Beaumont, said he was driving slowly early Thursday morning, headed into work, when he drove his Jeep Wrangler into deep water.

“I put my brakes on, but it was at the hood,” Chesson said. “By the time I stopped, it was over the hood.”

He tried backing up, but the Jeep was dead.

“Water was just gushing in,” he said.

He could not open the driver’s side door. He opened the passenger door, climbed on top of the Jeep and called 911. He was told no one could help him at the time, and so he swam and walked to a nearby hotel. Then the hotel started to flood, and Chesson and others went to the upper floors. Hours after he abandoned his Jeep at Interstate 10 and Highway 69, he was still stranded at the hotel.

At the Red Cross shelter in Anahuac on Thursday afternoon, children watched cartoons on a screen and raced toy cars in a corner. A woman lay curled up on a cot, a Red Cross blanket wrapped tightly around her. The parking lot was packed with firetrucks, air boats attached to trailers and camouflage emergency vehicles.

The shelter was about 20 miles away from Winnie, in one of the few places that remained accessible to vehicles.

Ellen Barber, 67, lay on her back on a cot in the middle of the room, her cane by her side. She was trying to sleep but was still too shaken up to rest. The waters started coming into her ground-floor apartment in Winnie at about midnight, she said. She grabbed her medicines and her grandfather’s Bible, called 911 and was evacuated. On the drive from Winnie to Anahuac, she said, she could not tell where the fields and the land began and the rivers and bayous ended.

“This was unexpected — Harvey was expected,” Barber said. “To me, this is worse.”

For Some in Texas, Imelda's Heavy Rain Feels Like Harvey 2.0

ANAHUAC, Texas — Sitting in a chair next to a green cot inside a disaster shelter, his small dog on his lap, Edmund Hann was in a daze. Two years ago, Hurricane Harvey flooded his home in Winnie, Texas. On Thursday, Tropical Depression Imelda did the same.

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Manny Fernandez and Sarah Mervosh

Articles written by the author

For Fort Worth Police Victim, a Funeral Full of Grief and Calls for Justice

For Some in Texas, Imelda's Heavy Rain Feels Like Harvey 2.0