Breonna Taylor's pregnant neighbor sues Louisville police for 'firing blindly' at her apartment during raid
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY: The neighbor of Breonna Taylor, the African-American woman who was shot and killed by three Louisville Metro Police officers as she was sleeping in her own home, has filed a lawsuit against the officers. In the lawsuit, filed in May and obtained by USA Today, Chelsea Napper said LMPD Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and officers Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove, "blindly fired" into Taylor's apartment, and a result, nearly struck a man inside her home. It alleged that they sprayed gunfire into her apartment "with a total disregard for the value of human life" and that "a bullet that was shot from the defendant police officers' gun flew inches past Cody Etherton's head while he was in the hallway of Chelsey Napper's apartment."
MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) previously reported that Taylor, a 26-year-old black emergency medical technician, was killed on March 13 after Mattingly, Hankison, and Cosgrove arrived at her home at 1 am with a no-knock search warrant and broke down her door.
Kenneth Walker, Taylor's boyfriend who was living with her and is licensed to carry, suspected their home was being broken into and fired a shot. He struck Mattingly in the femoral artery, and in response, was met by 20 rounds in return. Napper said in her lawsuit that she was pregnant and had a child at home at the time and that the gunshots struck objects in her living room, dining room, kitchen, and hallway. She said her sliding glass door was also shattered, photos of which were released by Taylor's family's attorney Sam Aguiar. She accused the officers of failing to use "sound reasonable judgment" when firing "blind shots into multiple homes." She, along with her child and Etherton, is seeking damages and a trial by jury against all three officers involved in the incident.
Mattingly, Hankison, and Cosgrove are also the subject of a wrongful death lawsuit from Taylor's family, as well as investigations being conducted by Louisville Metro Police's Public Integrity Unit and the FBI.
The officers had arrived at Taylor's residence as a part of a narcotics investigation, and while Taylor was not the suspect in the case, her name and address were both on the warrant. Her family said that the main suspect, Jamarcus Glover, was already in police custody at the time of the raid. They said drugs were not found in the 26-year-old's home, and that neither she nor Walker, who is currently facing charges of first-degree assault and attempted murder, had any criminal records.
Civil rights lawyer Benjamin Crump had described Taylor's tragic death as a "senseless killing." "We stand with the family of this young woman in demanding answers from the Louisville Police Department," he said in a statement. "Despite the tragic circumstances surrounding her death, the department has not provided any answers regarding the facts and circumstances of how this tragedy occurred, nor have they taken responsibility for her senseless killing."
"They're killing our sisters just like they're killing our brothers," he continued. "But for whatever reason, we have not given our sisters the same attention that we have given to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Stephon Clark, Terence Crutcher, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald. Breonna's name should be known by everybody in America who said those other names, because she was in her own home, doing absolutely nothing wrong."