The former detective, who faces charges that he recklessly endangered Breonna Taylor’s neighbors during a fatal police raid on her apartment, testified in court on Wednesday, saying he mistook his fellow officers’ shooting for the suspect’s rifle shooting.
This testimony marked the first time Detective Brett Hankinson has spoken publicly since the botched raid in Louisville, Kentucky in March 2020 that killed Ms. Taylor, and he described a chaotic scene and a series of missteps. Hankinson, 45, whose bullets hit no one, is on trial for three counts of wanton danger. Prosecutors say he endangered a family of three who lived near Ms Taylor when several bullets he fired passed through Ms Taylor’s apartment and hit them.
Mr. Hankinson, dressed in a gray suit with a silver tie, sounded nervous and gasped several times as he described the raid in which cops stormed Ms. Taylor’s door shortly after midnight, hoping to find evidence that her ex-boyfriend was selling drugs. They expected her to be home alone, but instead she was sleeping in bed next to her current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, when their knock on the door woke her up.
The police kicked down the door and Mr. Walker, who later said he believed the police officers were the intruders, fired his pistol once, hitting the officer in the thigh. The three policemen fired 32 shots in response, several of which hit Ms. Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room worker.
Taylor’s death was one of several police killings of blacks in the United States in 2020 that have sent millions of protesters onto the streets, sidewalks and plazas of America.
Mr. Hankinson, who worked with the Louisville Metro Police Department for about 17 years before being fired after the raid, testified that when Mr. Walker fired at the cops, the muzzle flash lit up the hallway inside the apartment and allowed him to briefly see a dark figure standing there in firing position. He said that the flash and loudness of the gunshot led him to mistakenly believe that Mr. Walker fired an AR-15 type rifle and not a pistol.
Then, as Mr. Hankinson was escaping from the door and running outside the apartment complex, he heard a volley of shots, which he thought were fired by the figure he saw inside, but were actually 22 shots fired by two other people. officers fired back. Mr. Hankinson wiped his nose and eyes as he spoke of his fears that officers were being shot at when they tried to treat a wounded officer, Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly.
“I knew that Sergeant Mattingly had fallen and I knew that they were trying to get to him, and it seemed to me that they were executed with this rifle,” said Mr Hankinson.
From the side of the building, Mr. Hankinson fired 10 bullets through a sliding glass door in Ms. Taylor’s apartment and a window, both of which were shuttered. Mr. Hankinson’s lawyer asked him what he was aiming at, and Mr. Hankinson said he fired in the direction of the muzzle flashes he saw in the apartment. Mr. Walker did not fire his pistol after the first shot.
In June 2020, the former chief of the Louisville Police Department fired Mr. Hankinson, writing in a letter that Mr. Hankinson “blindly” shot at the apartment and called his actions “a shock to my conscience.”
Mr. Hankison is the only officer to be charged for his actions during the raid. Several jurors who returned the indictment said the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, which is prosecuting, did not give them the opportunity to file charges against either of the two officers who shot Ms. Taylor.
Mr. Hankinson said that he had issued between 800 and 1,000 search warrants during his police career and had never fired a pistol in the line of duty until that night. But he also described a number of mistakes, including not knowing who was shooting, asking for help on the wrong radio channel, and forgetting the address of an apartment building.
However, when asked by his lawyer if he thinks he did something wrong, Mr. Hankinson replied, “Absolutely not.”
He said that he understood the anger and frustration of the neighbors, who feared for their lives when several bullets flew into their apartment, and apologized to them.
“And Ms. Taylor’s family, it was just … she didn’t need to die that night,” Mr. Hankinson said from the podium before prosecutors quickly retorted.
Chelsea Napper, who lived in the apartment that was hit by Mr Hankinson’s bullets, testified Tuesday that she was about seven months pregnant on the night of the police raid and that she was suddenly woken up by a loud sound outside. . Ms Napper said she and boyfriend Cody Atherton had no idea at first that the bullets that pierced their apartment had been fired by the police.
“Bullets were flying everywhere,” Ms. Napper said, describing her frantic rush to check on her son, who was 5 at the time, and how she cowered on the floor with him.
“I feared for my life, I feared for Cody’s life, I feared for the life of my unborn child and the life of my 5-year-old,” she said. Prosecutors called Mr Atherton to testify on the first day of the trial, which began last week and also included testimony from experts and police.
Since Ms. Taylor’s death, two states and numerous municipalities have banned or restricted the issuance of “no knock” warrants to police officers, which allow police officers to break into homes without warning; in the case of Ms. Taylor, the judge originally signed such a warrant, but the order was later changed to require the police to knock and identify themselves. The officers involved in the raid said they did, but Mr. Walker and many neighbors at the apartment complex said they only heard the police knocking on the door.
Miles Cosgrove, the detective who the FBI says fired the bullet that killed Ms Taylor, will not testify, the judge overseeing the case has ruled because he could be the subject of a federal investigation into a search of Ms Taylor’s apartment. Instead, the jury was shown a taped testimony he gave as part of the trial.