LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The 10 shots Brett Hankison fired into Breonna Taylor 's apartment the night she was killed in a police raid put Taylor, her neighbors and even one of Hankison’s fellow Louisville police officers in danger, federal prosecutors argued Monday.
Lawyers made opening statements in Hankison’s second federal trial in U.S. District Court in Louisville. Prosecutors are trying again to convict Hankison on charges that he violated the civil rights of Taylor and her neighbors by firing shots into her darkened windows the night of the 2020 raid. Last year’s trial ended with a jury deadlocked, prompting the judge to declare a mistrial.
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Taylor, a 26-year-old unarmed Black woman, was shot by officers in March 2020 after they broke down the door to her apartment to serve a search warrant. The officers returned fire after one was shot in the leg by Taylor’s boyfriend. Taylor's killing sparked racial injustice protests in the summer of 2020.
Hankison’s shots didn’t hit anyone, but prosecutors said the officer who fatally shot Taylor — Myles Cosgrove — was nearly hit by one of Hankison’s bullets. In all, three officers fired 32 shots during the raid.
“Detective Cosgrove was also nearly killed, not by a suspect, but by one of his fellow officers, the defendant,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Anna Gotfryd said. Both Hankison and Cosgrove were fired from the Louisville police department after Taylor's death.
Gotfryd said Hankison, 48, violated a basic police rule: “Don’t shoot at what you can’t see.”
After gunfire erupted, Hankison ran to the side of the apartment and “without being able to see anything, the defendant fired 10 shots" sending “bullets flying just a couple feet from where Detective Cosgrove was protecting” another officer who had been shot, Gotfryd said.
Federal prosecutors are attempting to do what Kentucky state prosecutors couldn’t — get a conviction against Hankison. In a 2022 state trial, Hankison was acquitted of charges that he endangered Taylor’s neighbors. No other officers who were at the raid have been charged.
An attorney for Hankison argued Monday that the longtime officer joined a poorly planned raid to earn some overtime and brought along his K-9 drug-detection dog.
“Brett Hankison didn’t have a hand in any of this. He’s there with a drug detection dog to search an apartment,” attorney Jack Byrd said.
Byrd said Hankison’s actions when the shooting began were aimed at protecting his fellow officers. After shots were fired, Hankison will testify he saw a figure inside the darkened apartment standing in a rifle stance and fired after he believed he saw “someone advancing up that hallway,” Byrd said.
“He was expected to try and save those officers,” Byrd told the jury. “None of his rounds hit anybody. He doesn’t shoot anybody. His (firing) patterns are close.”
Hankison faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if he is convicted on either of the federal charges.
Cosgrove took the witness stand on Monday and testified that he was at the door as it was breached and stepped over a fellow officer, former Louisville police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, who had been shot in the leg. He said at that point, he was in a “gunfight” with whomever was firing inside the apartment.
Investigators later determined that Cosgrove fired 16 rounds into the apartment, including the fatal shot that killed Taylor.
Cosgrove testified that some of Hankison's shots through Taylor's sliding glass door came close to where he was standing at one point. The shot trails were shown in an exhibit on Monday.
“It wasn’t until later on that I found that out that” the bullets had traveled close to the front door, he said.
He was asked whether he would have been in danger of being shot if he would have taken one more step forward.
“Yes,” Cosgrove replied.
One of Taylor’s neighbors also testified on Monday about Hankison’s bullets flying through her apartment, near where her 5-year-old son was sleeping. Chelsey Napper's apartment shared a wall with Taylor's unit and the night of the raid she was awakened to the sound of a loud boom.
“I was scared to death, I didn’t know what was going on, I was panicking,” Napper said.
She said bullet holes were visible in the walls of her apartment and her sliding glass door had been shot out, presumably by Hankison's errant shots. Napper said she has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Jury selection took about three days last week. Jurors were individually questioned out of the public eye as U.S. District Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings took precautions to protect their identities.