Brett Hankison, a former Louisville police detective, is facing three charges of wanton endangerment after the authorities said he fired “blindly” into Ms. Taylor’s apartment.
The only trial to emerge from the nighttime police raid that killed Breonna Taylor began on Wednesday, but the case centers not on an officer who shot her, but rather on a former police detective accused of recklessly endangering her neighbors by firing into their apartment in Louisville, Ky.
Brett Hankison, who was dismissed several months after the March 2020 raid, is facing three charges of wanton endangerment after firing 10 shots during the operation. The former chief of the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department said that Mr. Hankison had fired “blindly,” and that several bullets entered a neighbor’s apartment, endangering the three people who were sleeping there: a pregnant woman, her husband and their 5-year-old child. “This is not a case to decide who is responsible for the death of Breonna Taylor,” the state’s assistant attorney general, Barbara Maines Whaley, said during opening statements on Wednesday.
Ms. Whaley said the prosecution’s case would show that the former police detective acted that night with “extreme indifference to human life” and that he made several missteps that endangered the lives of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors, Chelsey Napper and Cody Etherson, as well as their son.
The defense, in its own opening statement, described Mr. Hankison as a veteran police officer who responded appropriately to what he perceived as a threat.
“You are going to discover that this scene was total chaos,” Mr. Hankison’s lawyer, Steve Matthews, told the jury.
When officers broke down the door during the raid, Ms. Taylor’s boyfriend shot one officer in the leg. The boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, later said that he had not heard them announce themselves and believed that they were intruders. Officers returned fire, killing Ms. Taylor.
Mr. Hankison fired 10 bullets into a patio door and window of Ms. Taylor’s apartment without a clear line of sight, and some of them entered the neighboring unit. His bullets struck a soap dish, a table and a sliding-glass door.
While none of Mr. Hankison’s bullets struck Ms. Taylor or anyone else, two other officers’ bullets struck Ms. Taylor, and she bled to death after being shot five or six times.
The neighbor, Mr. Etherson, described a terrifying barrage of gunfire that hit his apartment.
“To me, a professional, a well-trained officer, should have had the floor plans, the blueprints — they didn’t even know whose back door it was, they didn’t know who lived there,” said Mr. Etherson, the first witness to testify. “That kind of upset me. It was just reckless to me.”
Mr. Etherson said he awoke that night to the sounds of police ramming Ms. Taylor’s door open. Moments later, bullets pierced their shared wall. As Mr. Etherson walked toward the door, he said, debris pelted him in the face, forcing him to crawl back to the bedroom.
The bullets, he said, were just short of hitting either him or his son.
After the shooting stopped, Mr. Etherson moved to the back patio door, where he encountered the police, guns raised.
The killing of Ms. Taylor brought renewed scrutiny to no-knock warrants as competing accounts emerged about whether the police had identified themselves before knocking down her door. Officers had initially received a judge’s approval to serve a “no-knock” warrant, but the orders were changed before the raid and required them to announce their presence before entering the apartment.
Critics also questioned the justification the police used to obtain a warrant to conduct the raid. The police had told the court they believed they might find evidence of drug trafficking connected to Ms. Taylor’s former boyfriend, saying they believed that he had used her apartment to receive packages linked to drug dealing. But Ms. Taylor had recently severed ties with him, according to her family’s lawyer. Her ex-boyfriend was already in custody by the time officers raided her apartment. The police also did not have an ambulance stationed in the area, though it was the department’s standard practice to have one nearby.
Since Ms. Taylor’s death, several cities, including Houston and Minneapolis, have restricted the use of no-knock warrants. Earlier this month, a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed Amir Locke, a 22-year-old Black man, while serving a no-knock warrant on an apartment downtown.
The opening statements on Wednesday come months after the Kentucky attorney general, Daniel Cameron, announced that his office would not charge either of the two officers who shot Ms. Taylor, including Detective Myles Cosgrove, who the F.B.I. said fired the fatal bullet. Grand jurors who voted to indict Mr. Hankison said that Mr. Cameron had not presented them with the option of pursuing charges for killing Ms. Taylor.
In Louisville, people protested in the streets for more than 100 days over the failure to charge any officers in Ms. Taylor’s death. Earlier this month, lawyers and Judge Ann Bailey Smith of the Jefferson County Circuit Court began whittling a group of 250 jurors down to just 15, including 12 jurors and three alternates. The trial is expected to take about two weeks.
Under Kentucky law, a person commits the crime of wanton endangerment when he or she “wantonly engages in conduct which creates a substantial danger of death or serious physical injury to another person,” and does so “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.” Other states may use terms like “reckless endangerment” for an equivalent offense.
The crime is a felony and can bring a sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine for each count. A person can be guilty of wanton endangerment even if they did not intend to harm anyone or to commit a crime.
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February 24, 2022 at 01:32AM
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