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Louisville Police Department Fires 2 More Officers in Breonna Taylor Case

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Louisville Police Department Fires 2 More Officers in Breonna Taylor Case
Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., in an undated photograph. (Courtesy of Taylor family attorney Sam Aguiar via AP)
1/6/2021
Updated:
1/6/2021

The Louisville Police Department has fired two more officers who took part in the shooting of Breonna Taylor.

Detectives Myles Cosgrove and Joshua Jaynes were dismissed on Tuesday.

“Please be advised effective this date your employment with the Louisville Metro Police Department is terminated,” Chief of Police, Yvette Gentry wrote them, according to a copy of the termination letter to Cosgrove obtained by WFPL.

Gentry told him that “two of the sixteen rounds you fired were found in the body of Ms. Breonna Taylor,” adding that one of those shots killed her.

“The shots you fired went in three different directions, indicating you did not verify a threat or have target acquisition,” Gentry wrote. “In other words, the evidence shows that you fired wildly at unidentified subjects or targets located within an apartment.”

A battering ram used in the March 13, 2020, raid of Breonna Taylor's apartment in Louisville, Ky. (Louisville Metro Police Department)
A battering ram used in the March 13, 2020, raid of Breonna Taylor's apartment in Louisville, Ky. (Louisville Metro Police Department)
The dramatic and sometimes conflicting accounts of the March 13 raid are key to a case that has fueled nationwide protests. When police came through the door using a battering ram, Taylor’s boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired once. He acknowledges that he may not have heard police identify themselves because of where he was in the apartment. He said that if he’d heard them, “it changes the whole situation because there’s nothing for us to be scared of.”
Over 4,000 pages of investigation related to the shooting were made public by Louisville police in October 2020.

Officers Cosgrove, Brett Hankison, and Jonathan Mattingly executed a search warrant on March 18 on Taylor’s apartment in Springfield Drive.

Demonstrators march during a protest in New York City on Sept. 23, 2020. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP Photo)
Demonstrators march during a protest in New York City on Sept. 23, 2020. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP Photo)

The officers said that before breaching, they banged on the door:

“I knocked on the door. Banged on it. We didn’t announce the first couple because our intent was not to, to hit the door,” Mattingly told the investigators. “Our intent was to give her plenty of time to come to the door because they said she was probably there alone.”

The police said that they got no response from the knocking, then they identified themselves.

Mattingly said that they waited for 45 seconds to one minute.

“It seems like an eternity where you’re up at a door waiting,” he said.

He continued saying that after he entered, he saw two people, one of them had a gun in their hand, and then Taylor’s boyfriend, Walker, fired at least one shot that hit Mattingly, which prompted the three police officers to fire back