2 more Louisville officers tied to Breonna Taylor raid will be fired
The Louisville police officer who fired the shot that killed Breonna Taylor, a Black emergency-room technician whose death set off a wave of protests, was told Tuesday that the department was moving to oust him from the force, as was a second officer who arranged the nighttime raid on her home.
The move is the most significant acknowledgment by the department that its officers had committed serious violations when they burst through Taylor’s door late one night in March, encountered gunfire, and then fired a volley of shots at her and her boyfriend. The terminations mark an effort by the city’s interim police chief, Yvette Gentry, to achieve the reckoning she promised when she agreed to come out of retirement to lead the troubled department into the beginning of the new year.
Lawyers for Detective Myles Cosgrove, one of the officers who shot Taylor, and Detective Joshua Jaynes, who prepared the search warrant for the raid, said each had received notices of termination. Both have been on administrative reassignment as the investigations have been underway.
Until now, the only officer held accountable in the case had been Brett Hankison, a detective, who was fired in June for violating the department’s deadly force policy by shooting off 10 rounds from outside the apartment through two of Taylor’s windows. He was indicted by a grand jury in September on three counts of wanton endangerment because shots he fired entered a neighboring apartment.
The March 13 raid, in which Louisville officers were searching for evidence in a drug case, was compromised by poor planning and reckless execution, a New York Times review of witness accounts, video footage and officer statements showed.
Police officers said they knocked loudly and announced themselves, though most of the neighbors said they did not hear them do so. Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired a shot toward the door, striking one of the officers in the leg.
Cosgrove, a 15-year veteran of the department, shot Taylor at least three times, killing her, according to an FBI ballistics analysis. He was the second person to enter Taylor’s apartment and fired 16 rounds down the hallway.
Taylor’s family claimed that no drugs or proceeds of drug trafficking were found at her apartment. The police department counters that it never conducted a full search, calling it off once the shooting occurred. In a series of recorded jailhouse calls in the hours after her death, Taylor’s ex-boyfriend told another woman that he had left thousands of dollars with Taylor. Police suspect the ex-boyfriend operated trap houses.