HELD TO ACOUNT

Feds Charge FOUR Louisville Cops Over Botched Breonna Taylor Raid

The current and former officers are charged with federal civil rights violations.

At a bombshell press conference on Thursday morning, the feds alleged that the infamously botched raid that led to Breonna Taylor’s death was littered with criminal missteps and cover-ups, complete with a secret garage meeting between two Louisville Metro Police Department officers.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that four current and former LMPD officers—former detective Joshua Jaynes, detective Kelly Goodlett, former detective Brett Hankinson, and Sgt. Kyle Meany—have been arrested and charged with federal crimes, including civil rights violations and unconstitutional use of force.

The DOJ alleges that Jaynes lied on the search warrant application that let officers carry out the “no-knock” raid on Taylor’s apartment in March 2020. He wrote in the search warrant that he “verified with a U.S. Postal Inspector” that Taylor’s ex, whom police suspected of dealing drugs, had been receiving mail at her address. However, an internal investigation found that Jaynes had not verified the information with a postal worker himself, but rather relied on another officer’s false word.

In fact, the officer with whom Jaynes spoke, Jonathan Mattingly, was not in contact with a postal inspector either. Mattingly only ever got the information from a different police department. The investigation found not only that Jaynes lied about his verification efforts, but that there were never any relevant packages arriving at Taylor’s home.

Taylor had also broken up with the ex, Jamarcus Glover, some two years earlier, her family’s attorney said. Moreover, Glover was already in custody at the time of the raid.

The charges, Garland said, allege that Jaynes, Meany, and Goodlett knew that the information in the warrant was false and then engaged in efforts to create a “false cover story in an attempt to escape responsibility for their roles in preparing” the fraudulent warrant. Two of the officers, Garland said, stealthily met in a garage in the spring of 2020 and “agreed to tell investigators a false story.”

Jaynes and Goodlett also knew, the DOJ alleges, that armed officers would conduct the search, creating a dangerous situation for anyone in the home. According to Garland, the officers who carried out the warrant were unaware of the false statements and were not involved in drafting the warrant application.

In a separate indictment, Hankinson is charged with two civil rights violations related to unconstitutional use of excessive force. The charges allege he fired 10 unnecessary and unlawful shots through a bedroom window and sliding glass patio door, endangering not only Taylor’s life but the lives of her neighbors as well.

Hankinson was the only cop to be charged over the raid at the state level, but he was found not guilty by a jury earlier this year of endangering Taylor’s three neighbors, a verdict Taylor’s lawyer called “a slap in the face.”

Of the more recent charges, however, lawyer Ben Crump struck a different note. In a statement, he called it “a huge step toward justice.”

A separate DOJ team is conducting a civil investigation related to the LMPD as a whole, Garland said, probing whether the department has a pattern of law enforcement misconduct related to excessive force, improper searches, and racially discriminatory policing practices.

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Officers stormed Taylor’s apartment in the dead of night, startling her boyfriend, Kenny Walker, from his sleep. He assumed they were being burglarized, so grabbed his legally owned handgun and fired a warning shot down the hallway that hit Mattingly in the leg. That prompted officers to unleash a hail of bullets into the apartment.

Officers shot Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, eight times and she bled out on the floor as they tended to the injured Mattingly. No drugs were ever found in the apartment.

LMPD fired Jaynes in Jan. 2021; he appealed his dismissal, but lost the case. Hankinson was also fired from the department, and Mattingly retired after the raid.

Though Crump celebrated Thursday’s announcement, he said many victims of police brutality are still seeking justice. He ended his statement with what has become, heartbreakingly, a familiar refrain: “Say her name. Breonna Taylor.”