After nearly two years, one of the Kentucky officers involved in the botched 2020 botched raid that ended in Breonna Taylor’s tragic death is finally on trial.
Prosecutors on Wednesday, however, stressed former Louisville police officer Brett Hankison is not on trial for killing the 26-year-old EMT worker—but for the 10 shots that were fired into a neighboring apartment building, endangering a pregnant couple and their young son.
“Breonna Taylor shouldn’t have died that night,” Assistant Attorney General Barbara Whaley said Wednesday during opening arguments. “This is case is about Cody [Etherton] and his partner Chelsea [Napper], who was 7 months pregnant at the time and their 5-year-old son, who was sleeping in the bedroom closest to the front door when the bullets ripped through the apartment and out their sliding glass door, into the night.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Hankison, 44, faces three counts of wanton endangerment for the March 13, 2020, raid at Taylor’s apartment. At the time of the search warrant—which was issued as part of an investigation into a suspected drug dealer who lived in a different part of town and had already been arrested—Taylor and her boyfriend, Kenny Walker, were asleep in their apartment.
So were Etherton and his pregnant partner.
“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 on the stand on Wednesday, describing to jurors how he had to crawl back to his partner in the bedroom as shots continued to ring out. “It was so chaotic.”
A month after the shooting, Hankison was fired for his conduct in the raid. He showed an “extreme indifference to the value of human life” by “blindly” firing 10 rounds into Taylor’s home, a termination letter said.
Taylor’s death prompted an FBI investigation and a wave of protests, as anger also grew over the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Amid ongoing outrage over the lack of criminal charges, the city of Louisville in September 2020 reached a $12 million settlement in the Taylor family’s wrongful death lawsuit.
Prosecutors on Wednesday argued that this trial is not about the search warrant that led to Taylor’s apartment, but about “the actions of Brett Hankison” and the “circumstances under which he acted.”
Etherton and his partner were asleep in their apartment when they were awakened by the “banging” on Taylor’s door, Whaley said.
The first witness on the stand, Etherton recounted to the jury how he initially thought someone was breaking into his apartment and ran to the door to “protect his family.” As he tried to get to his front door, he said he was hit in the face with a piece of drywall as a bullet flew through his apartment and past his head.
During the raid, prosecutors said that Hankison “shot into” the apartment building, prompting several of these bullets to go through two apartments, including Etherton’s. At least three bullets “ripped through” Etherton’s apartment, shattering their sliding glass door and putting all those inside in danger, according to prosecutors.
Etherton said after the gunfire, there were about 30 seconds of silence before he heard police officers yelling outside. When he poked his head outside into the breezeway of the apartment, Etherton testified he saw Taylor’s door open and from inside the pitch-black apartment he heard someone say, “Breathe, baby, breathe.”
“That's when I knew it was serious,” Etherton said.
Prosecutors say that after the shooting, Hankison insisted that he fired his weapon more than necessary because he claimed to see an individual with an “AR rifle” outside of Taylor’s apartment. Whaley said that evidence proves there was never a rifle at the building that night.
Stew Matthews, the defense attorney for the former cop, told jurors Wednesday morning that his client was simply responding to the “total chaos” of the raid that included seven police officers.
“You are going to discover this scene was total chaos,” he said. “Hankison is going to tell you that when that door was breached he had a straight shot and saw a muzzle flash,” Mathews said, indicating that his client is set to testify on his own behalf.
