USA TODAY International Edition
Officer: Race played no role
Louisville officer speaks publicly for first time
MONTGOMERY, Ohio – A Louisville, Kentucky, officer at the center of the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor said her death is a tragedy, but it shouldn’t be lumped in with the slayings of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.
Jonathan Mattingly, the Louisville Metro Police Department sergeant who was shot in the same incident that cost Taylor her life, spoke exclusively to The Courier Journal and ABC News Tuesday.
“This had nothing to do with race,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
He described publicly for the first time what happened the night police tried to serve a search warrant shortly before 1 a. m. March 13 at Taylor’s apartment in Louisville, looking for drugs and cash as part of a larger narcotics operation.
In the wide- ranging interview, Mattingly slammed city and police leaders for not moving more swiftly to correct the “false narratives” surrounding Taylor’s death.
“Because this is not relatable to George Floyd. This is nothing like that,” Mattingly said. “It’s not Ahmaud Arbery. It’s nothing like it. These are two totally different types of incidents. It’s not a race thing like people wanna try to make it to be. It’s not.
“This is not us going, hunting somebody down. This is not kneeling on a neck. It’s nothing like that.”
Mattingly is one of three officers who fired their weapons into Taylor’s apartment after her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired at them. Walker said
he didn’t know it was police at the door.
Police said Walker’s bullet struck Mattingly in the left thigh, severing his femoral artery, which required emergency surgery.
Mattingly, along with Detectives Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove, fired 32 shots into the apartment, hitting Taylor six times and killing her in her hallway.
None of the officers faces homicide charges in her death, though Hankison faces three counts of wanton endangerment for shots that penetrated a neighboring apartment where three people were home.
Taylor’s death touched off more than 140 consecutive days of protests in Louisville and demonstrations across America.
Mattingly said Floyd’s death was a case of misconduct and the abuse of power. Taylor’s death was neither, he said.
He said it fit a convenient narrative for the “( Ben) Crumps and the Sam Aguiars to inflame people to get the end result they wanted.”
Crump and Aguiar are attorneys for Taylor’s family. Crump has been involved in many civil cases involving high- profile deaths of Black Americans.
Mattingly said every cop’s biggest fear is shooting an innocent person. He reflected on a warrant from a decade earlier when a suspect shot at him through a door.
Mattingly didn’t shoot back and later learned a baby and little girl were asleep inside the apartment.
“You want to do the right thing,” Mattingly said. “You want to be the one who is protecting, not up here looking to do any damage to anybody’s family. That’s not anybody’s desire that I’ve worked with.”
When Taylor died March 13, Mattingly’s fear came true.
“She didn’t deserve to die,” he said. “She didn’t do anything to deserve a death sentence.”
Mattingly said police weren’t there to act as the judge, jury and executioners that night.
“What we were being was someone who’s defending their lives against gunfire coming at them,” he said.
But, Mattingly said, they weren’t at Taylor’s house by “happenstance.”
“There’s a reason the police were there that night,” he said. “And if you’re a law- abiding citizen, the only contact you’ll probably ever have with the police is running into them in Thorntons or if you get a speeding ticket. Other than that, unless you know them, you’re not really dealing with the police.
“And I think that’s part of the problem, because the people who say there’s all this injustice and all that are the people who deal with the police in negative connotations. So naturally, their view of the police is going to be skewed and not good.”
Mattingly said he thinks Walker knew they were police. He said his experience has been that you don’t have “that loud of a knock, that loud of announce, that long – and people not know it’s police.”
“Everybody knows the police knock,” Mattingly said. “When that took place for that long – and they had that much time to think and react and formulate a plan – I don’t know he didn’t hear us. We were talking 20 feet away through a thin metal door.
“So, my opinion, yes, he heard. But I’m not the end- all, be- all.”
‘ I don’t want people to think we’re hiding’
Mattingly said he no longer thinks he’ll return to the department, despite
initially wanting to go back to work.
Asked what changed, the sergeant pointed to the climate from leadership, including the mayor’s office, and the perception of him some members of the public have. He said his name has been so smeared that it would probably be too unsafe for his family for him to return.
He said he reached his 20- year mark with the department, giving him the possibility of retiring.
He doesn’t plan to do that, however, until after the Professional Standards Unit investigation initiated into officers’ conduct at Taylor’s apartment is completed.
“I don’t want people to think we’re hiding,” he said.
Mattingly said he plans to try to help others, including police officers, who face similar types of incidents.
“There is no playbook for this. There is no guidebook that says when you’re in these types of incidents, here’s what you do, here’s what your family needs to do, here’s who you need to call,” Mattingly said. “There’s nothing.”
‘ Then it got out of control’
Mattingly fired some of his sharpest criticism at Mayor Greg Fischer and his administration. He said he begged the office to release evidence or factual information but was told officials didn’t want to “set precedent” for future cases.
“My response to that was, ‘ So you’re willing to let the city burn down to not set a precedent for another case?’” Mattingly said. “A lot of ( the) flames that have come up, a lot of this stuff could have been diverted. Now, would people still have a problem with it? Yes. But I think with the truth coming out, then you wouldn’t have as much distrust.”
As Taylor’s death gained attention, Mattingly said “each day that passed” without misinformation being clarified was “adding fuel to the fire.” He pointed to claims that Taylor was asleep and that officers were at the wrong home.
“It fell on deaf ears, and politics, in my opinion, played a big part of it,” he said, declining to elaborate on whom specifically he urged to speak out.
‘ Political game’
Mattingly referred to officers being part of the “Mayors political game” in an email he sent. He said Tuesday he’s “not sure yet” what the game is, but he thinks it will come to light.
“There’s a reason that the fire wasn’t put out early, that he let it simmer until it got to where it was at, and then it got out of control, and I don’t think he knew how to reel it back in,” Mattingly said.
Asked what message he would have for Fischer, Mattingly said, “I don’t appreciate him coming in my hospital room and talking about my son. And then turning around and never addressing the fact that my son’s life was threatened and never being the type of leader he should have been, standing behind what we did.”
In a statement, Fischer said, “I deeply appreciate and respect the difficult and often dangerous job that our police officers do. My focus from the start of the Breonna Taylor case has been to get to the truth – for Breonna, her family
and our larger community, which obviously includes the men and women of LMPD. That requires letting the legal process play out, no matter how challenging it may be. In the meantime, we will continue to move forward and take steps toward healing, reform and progress.”
Mattingly, a married father of four, said he and his family have been victims throughout this ordeal, too. The family received threats deemed credible enough by the FBI to suggest they leave their home at 11 p. m. one night. A few days ago, a man threatened to kidnap, tie up and torture his young son.
“That’s not stuff that you’re just gonna go, ‘ Ah, no big deal. Ah just go on,’” he said.
Mattingly has been with the LMPD since 2000 and worked in several divisions before joining narcotics in 2016.
In September, he sent out a sixparagraph email to more than 1,000 colleagues, arguing he and the other officers at Taylor’s home had done the “legal, moral and ethical thing” that night.
“Remember that you are just a pawn in the Mayors political game,” he wrote to fellow officers. “I’m proof they do not care about you or your family, and you are replaceable.”
In an interview with LMPD investigators after the shooting, Mattingly described Taylor’s home as a “soft target” of minimal threat.
“They said they did not believe she had children or animals, but they weren’t sure,” Mattingly told investigators in a police interview almost two weeks after her death. “Said she should be there alone because they knew where their target was.”
He said officers there that night hadn’t been involved in the narcotics investigation that led police to her door.
“We didn’t write ( the warrant),” he said. “We didn’t do any of the investigation. We did none of the background.”
Leaked investigative files indicated Mattingly was involved in asking police in Shively, Kentucky, to look into whether her ex- boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, a subject of the narcotics investigation, had received packages at her address.
The detective who sought the warrant, Joshua Jaynes, told police in an interview in May that he asked Mattingly to look into the matter – despite writing in the sworn affidavit he had verified the information with a U. S. postal inspector himself.
Jaynes said Mattingly “nonchalantly” told him Glover “just gets Amazon or mail packages there.”
An attorney for Mattingly wrote in a statement last week that Mattingly “merely” gave Jaynes “the name of a contact at the Shively Police Department who was working on a task force with the Postal Inspectors as a source for information.”
“Sgt. Mattingly never advised Officer Jaynes that packages for Glover had been delivered at Breonna Taylor’s apartment,” said Kent Wicker, Mattingly’s attorney. “Sgt. Mattingly did not draft the search warrant affidavit, did not sign it and did not even see it before it was served.”