Officer Accused of Recklessly Firing in Breonna Taylor Raid Goes on Trial
The New York Times
Brett Hankison, a former Louisville police detective, is facing three charges of wanton endangerment after the authorities said he fired “blindly” into Ms. Taylor’s apartment.
The only trial to emerge from the nighttime police raid that killed Breonna Taylor began on Wednesday, but the case centers not on an officer who shot her, but rather on a former police detective accused of recklessly endangering her neighbors by firing into their apartment in Louisville, Ky.
Brett Hankison, who was dismissed several months after the March 2020 raid, is facing three charges of wanton endangerment after firing 10 shots during the operation. The former chief of the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department said that Mr. Hankison had fired “blindly,” and that several bullets entered a neighbor’s apartment, endangering the three people who were sleeping there: a pregnant woman, her husband and their 5-year-old child. “This is not a case to decide who is responsible for the death of Breonna Taylor,” the state’s assistant attorney general, Barbara Maines Whaley, said during opening statements on Wednesday.
Ms. Whaley said the prosecution’s case would show that the former police detective acted that night with “extreme indifference to human life” and that he made several missteps that endangered the lives of Ms. Taylor’s neighbors, Chelsey Napper and Cody Etherson, as well as their son.
