Officer in Breonna Taylor Raid Says He Mistook Police Gunfire for a Suspect’s

Brett Hankison is on trial over charges that he endangered Ms. Taylor’s neighbors. His bullets did not strike anyone, and he testified that he had done nothing wrong in the fatal police raid.

The former detective who is facing charges of recklessly endangering Breonna Taylor’s neighbors during the fatal police raid on her apartment testified at his trial on Wednesday, saying that he wrongly interpreted the sound of his fellow officers spraying bullets into Ms. Taylor’s apartment as that of a suspect firing a rifle at the police.

The testimony marked the first time that the detective, Brett Hankison, has spoken publicly since the botched March 2020 raid in Louisville, Ky., that left Ms. Taylor dead, and he described a chaotic scene and a series of errors. Mr. Hankison, 45, whose bullets did not strike anyone, is on trial for three counts of wanton endangerment. Prosecutors say he endangered a family of three who lived next to Ms. Taylor when several of the bullets that he fired traveled through Ms. Taylor’s apartment and into theirs.

Mr. Hankison, wearing a gray suit with a silver tie, sounded nervous, and he choked up several times as he described the raid, during which officers burst through Ms. Taylor’s door shortly after midnight in hopes of finding evidence that her former boyfriend had been selling drugs. They had expected that she would be home alone, but instead she was sleeping in bed next to her current boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, when their banging on the door woke her up.