One of the Louisville Metro police officers who burst into Breonna Taylor’s apartment in 2020 and opened fire broke down on the witness stand Wednesday as he recalled seeing his colleague get hit in the leg.
Former officer Brett Hankison is the only cop to go on trial in the aftermath of the botched raid but not for charges related to Taylor’s death; he’s accused of wanton endangerment for firing 10 shots that hit a neighboring apartment building, allegedly endangering a pregnant woman, her partner, and their 5-year-old son.
Hankison choked up several times on Wednesday as he described seeing his friend, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, drop to the floor beside him and say “I’m hit” or “I’m down.”
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Moments earlier, the officers had barged into Taylor’s apartment on a “no-knock” warrant related to a narcotics investigation into Taylor’s ex-boyfriend. As they set off muzzle flashes in the pitch-black apartment, Hankison said he could see a shadowy figure down the hallway in “a shooting stance” holding what he thought was a rifle.
When Mattingly was hit, Hankison said he immediately backed out of the apartment into a breezeway and started firing through a glass patio door, which was covered by a curtain. He thought the gunfire he could hear was being exchanged by the other cops and the armed person inside the house, he said.
“I knew Sergeant Mattingly was down and I knew [the other officers] were trying to get to him and it appeared to me that they were being executed with this rifle,” he said as he fought back tears, later adding, “I felt helpless knowing that I had a handgun facing rifle fire.”
He described radioing for help for Mattingly. Meanwhile, Taylor lay dying in a hallway inside.
Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenny Walker, a legal gun owner, later said he fired a single warning shot when the plainclothes officers burst in, assuming they were intruders. Three officers returned fire with 32 shots.
The front of Breonna Taylor’s ground-floor apartment.
Jefferson County Circuit CourtHankison told the jury that, once Mattingly had been taken away by EMS, he ordered the person inside the house to come out with their hands up. After handcuffing Walker, Hankison said Walker asked him what was going on.
“I said, ‘You shot the police?’” Hankison testified.
Walker replied that he didn’t, so Hankison said he asked who did.
“He said, ‘My girlfriend. She shot you with her 9,’” Hankison said. When he asked where the girlfriend was, Walker replied, “She’s dead inside.”
Hankison said that “kinda shook me” because officers had been briefed before the raid that Taylor would be home alone. “And now there’s allegedly a girl dead inside and that wasn’t why we were there,” he said, again fighting back tears. “We were there to get documents and or items related to a boyfriend that was drug trafficking and that happened to visit that location.” He said he initially thought Walker might have killed Taylor.
Hankison described the entire incident as a “tragedy” and “something that didn’t have to happen.” He apologized to the neighbors and then addressed Taylor’s family. “She didn’t need to die that night,” he said before he was cut off by an objection from prosecutors.
But when asked if he did anything wrong that night, he replied, “Absolutely not.”
As he began to address Taylor’s family, her mother, Tamika Palmer, stormed out of the courtroom, according to the Louisville Courier Journal’s reporter.
Under cross-examination, prosecutor Barbara Maines Whaley tried to paint Hankison’s actions as reckless, questioning why he fired through a curtain-covered glass door when all he could apparently see inside was flashes of light. She asked if he was concerned that he might hit the officers who were still inside trying to get Mattingly out.
“Absolutely not,” he replied.
Hankison was fired a month after the raid for showing “extreme indifference to the value of human life” by blindly firing through the door and window of Taylor’s apartment. But national outrage over Taylor’s death only intensified when a grand jury declined to indict Hankison, Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove for killing Taylor.
Last week, Cody Etherton recounted the terrifying moment bullets tore through his family’s neighboring apartment. He first thought someone was breaking into their home so he ran to the door to “protect his family,” he said. But as he reached the door, he was hit in the face with a piece of drywall as a bullet flew past his head. At least three bullets entered the apartment, shattering a glass door, prosecutors said.
“One or two more inches, I would have been shot. My son would have never got to meet me and I would have never met my son,” Etherton testified, adding that he had to crawl back to his partner in the bedroom as shots continued to ring out. “It was so chaotic.”
