CHICAGO, Sept 10 — A white Texas police officer who entered an apartment mistaking it for her own and shot dead the black man who lived there has been arrested on manslaughter charges.

Officer Amber Guyger with the Dallas Police Department was booked into jail yesterday and later released on US$300,000 bail, according to law enforcement.

In what city officials have called a “very unique” and “tragic” case, Guyger entered the apartment in a complex near downtown Dallas late Thursday and shot a man she thought was an intruder.

Minutes after the shooting, the officer, who had just returned home from her shift, called emergency services and told responding officers that she mistakenly thought she had entered her own apartment.

Advertisement

The victim was identified as Botham Shem Jean, 26, a black immigrant from the Caribbean island nation of Saint Lucia.

Jean had graduated from a private Christian college in the state of Arkansas in 2016 and had since been working at the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in Dallas.

“Please continue to pray for the family of Botham Jean tonight and in the weeks and months ahead,” Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said in a statement, adding that law enforcement was “thoroughly investigating this tragic case.”

Advertisement

There have been limited details made public.

But the case quickly became embroiled in the politics of police brutality protests in the US following a series of fatal encounters between police and African Americans.

Protesters on Friday demanded Guyger’s arrest and accused police of showing preferential treatment in the case by delaying charges against her.

Wrong floor, open door

According to the Dallas Morning News, Guyger got off on the wrong floor of the building complex and approached an apartment exactly one floor above her own.

The door reportedly was unlocked and the lights were off inside the apartment. When Guyger saw a figure moving in the dark, she pulled out her pistol and opened fire thinking it was an intruder, the newspaper reported.

Video posted online showed Guyger still in uniform, pacing outside the apartment and crying, and paramedics conducting chest compressions as a patient was wheeled away on a gurney.

Dallas police said that the 30-year-old officer has been with the department for four years. Local reports said she was involved in an earlier shooting in May 2017.

Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall, calling the shooting a “very unique situation,” took the unusual step of handing the case over to the Texas Rangers, a state-wide law enforcement agency, for an independent investigation.

Hall is African-American and the city’s first female police chief. She asked residents to “remain patient as this investigation is conducted.”

Jean’s mother Allison Jean, earlier told NBC News that the incident “feels like a nightmare.”

Her son “was in no wrong place at any wrong time. He was in his sanctuary, in the place where he called home. He didn’t deserve this,” she said.

Dallas police previously have found themselves at the centre of nationwide debate over deadly interactions between officers and black civilians.

Five of the city’s officers were shot and killed by a sniper at the end of a 2016 protest over police shootings.

The gunman Micah Johnson, who was African American and died in an ensuing standoff, told police he had targeted white officers. — AFP