PSA honoring Botham Jean and showing the ‘human cost of police brutality’ to air during Super Bowl

A public service announcement to honor Botham Jean and show the “human cost of police brutality” will air during the Super Bowl this year, the family’s lawyer said.

The PSA produced by Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation and the NFL was released Wednesday. The two-minute video features Jean’s family narrating and referring to Jean in the present tense, which the family’s attorney Lee Merritt told The Dallas Morning News was done to reflect his lasting legacy.

“What I hope to see happening is that our black boys are not seen as a threat,” Jean’s mother, Allison Jean, says in the announcement. “What happened to Botham should not happen to another family.”

https://t.co/0k9IQU4xM5
We are in this together.#EveryonesChild #InspireChange pic.twitter.com/yaH04eG2OA

— NFL (@NFL) January 22, 2020

“The color of my skin can be perceived as a weapon, and it’s not,” Jean’s sister, Allisa Findley, also said in the video.

In 2018 Jean was fatally shot by a former Dallas police officer while he was in his own apartment. The officer Amber Guyger was convicted of murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The family was initially hesitant to work with the NFL because of the controversy surrounding former player Colin Kaepernick and other players after they protested police brutality by kneeling during the National Anthem, but Merritt told the newspaper the family was pleased with how it turned out.

“Since then, the NFL has worked to see what they could do to try to right their wrongs,” Merritt told the newspaper. “This isn’t the compromise that I was hoping for; I was hoping that the players would be released to resume their on-the-field protest. But this is a step in the right direction.”

The NFL reportedly also reached out to the families of O’Shae Terry, a black man killed by an Arlington, Texas, police officer days before Jean, and Atatiana Jefferson, a black woman killed in her home in Fort Worth, Texas, to propose creating similar videos.