By Stacy M. Brown, NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
The City of Louisville, Kentucky, on Wednesday, fired Det. Myles Cosgrove, the police officer who shot and killed Breonna Taylor, and Det. Joshua Jaynes, the cop who sought the warrant that led to the fatal and flawed March 13, 2020 raid of Taylor’s home.
Officer Brett Hankison was fired in June and a grand jury indicted him in September on charges of endangering Taylor’s neighbors by shooting through a nearby apartment’s windows.
The terminations were announced as the city named former Atlanta Police Chief Erika Shields to head Louisville’s department. However, it was the Interim Police Chief, Yvette Gentry, who made the decision to terminate the officers.
Each of the officers is white. The officers have the right to appeal the decisions within ten days.
Taylor, a Black woman, was in bed sleeping next to her boyfriend when the officers attempted to serve a no-knock search warrant.
Officers falsely associated Taylor with a former boyfriend’s alleged drug activities because they claimed that the man used Taylor’s address, making the house fair game for a police raid.
After a grand jury failed to indict the officers, a defiant Kentucky Attorney General, Daniel Cameron, maintained his desire to keep secret the recording of the grand jury proceedings in Taylor’s case despite a judge’s order to release them.
Judge Ann Bailey Smith ruled that the recording and all discovery documents cannot be shared merely between the parties.
Smith set Wednesday, September 30, 2020 as the day the recordings were to be released. The Kentucky Attorney General complied with her order.
Taylor, a 26-year-old former EMT worker, was shot at least a half-dozen times when officers breached her apartment to serve the erroneous warrant.
One member of the grand jury argued that Cameron “attempted to make very clear that the grand jury alone made the decision on who and what to charge.”
The anonymous juror added that “the only exception to the responsibility he foisted upon the grand jurors was in his statement that they ‘agreed’ with his team’s investigation that Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and officer Myles Cosgrove were justified in their actions.”
“It’s a compelling public interest for these proceedings to be released,” the juror continued in court filings.
“The citizens of this Commonwealth have demonstrated their lack of faith in the process and proceedings in this matter and the justice system itself. Using the grand jurors as a shield to deflect accountability and responsibility for these decisions only sow more seeds of doubt in the process while leaving a cold chill down the spines of future grand jurors.”
