Officer in raid on Breonna Taylor’s home says ‘didn’t deserve to die’

A Louisville police officer who shot Breonna Taylor after he was wounded by her boyfriend’s gunshot said she “didn’t deserve to die.”

Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly said Taylor, a 26-year- old emergency medical worker who was roused from her bed by police serving a narcotics warrant, “didn’t do anything to deserve a death sentence.”

Mat t in g ly spoke to ABC News and the Louisville Courier Journal, his first media interviews on the shooting that sparked weeks of protests in the city.

He said he and his fellow officers had gone to Taylor’s apartment to serve a warrant in a drug case that targeted her ex-boyfriend, and had to defend themselves once they were fired upon.

“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.”

Mattingly and another officer, Myles Cosgrove, fired into the apartment’s front entry after Taylor’s current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, shot Mattingly in the leg. Walker said he thought an intruder had come through the door. Taylor was shot five times and died at the scene.

A grand jury last month charged a third officer who also fired his gun with endangering Taylor’s neighbors, however, none of the three were charged in Taylor’s death. On Tuesday, an anonymous grand juror won a court battle to speak publicly and said the panel was not given the option to consider charges related to Taylor’s death because prosecutors believed the officers were justified in using force.

Mattingly, 44, said the protests and media reports that followed the shooting unfairly compared Taylor’s death to the slaying of George Floyd in Minnesota and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.