News Roundup: Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger Fired After Shooting

Our daily look at Texas headlines.

By Becky FogelSeptember 25, 2018 8:01 pm

The Standard’s news roundup gives you a quick hit of interesting, sometimes irreverent, and breaking news stories from all over the state.

The Dallas Police Department has fired the white officer facing manslaughter charges for killing a black man in his own apartment.

30-year-old Amber Guyger claims when she shot 26-year-old Botham Jean on September 6, she believed he was an intruder in her apartment. That’s a claim the attorneys for Jean’s family have been questioning. One of those lawyers is Daryl Washington, and he told WFAA that Jean’s family is happy Guyger was fired.

But we really would have hoped this is something that would have happened a week ago or so,” Washington said.

Jean’s family buried him in his native St. Lucia Monday.



Here’s a story that’s a little bananas or dare I say, b-a-n-a-n-a-s.

At the end of last week, Texas prison authorities went to the Ports America in Freeport to pick up a donated shipment of bananas.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson, Jeremy Desel says this is a pretty typical occurrence.

Freeport reached out to TDCJ and suggested that they had a couple of palettes of bananas that had gotten too ripe, that they were interested in donating,” Desel says. “That’s a fairly common practice whether it’s too our system that has a significant food service area or food banks. Ports all over the country make these sorts of produce donations all the time when things get a little too ripe on their docks.”

Desel says, in a way, it was good TDCJ officials got the call and not another entity, because they’re trained to search for contraband. And when they went to pick up the boxes this past Friday, they noticed something was wrong.

One of the boxes just didn’t seem quite right, seemed a little bit too large, so they cut the straps on the bananas and took that box off,” Desel says. “Opened up that box and moved some of the bananas around and saw a package with a white powdery substance inside and immediately contact customs authorities.”

It turned out to be 540 packages of cocaine, worth an estimated $18 million or so. Federal authorities are now investigating.



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