4 Louisville Police Officers Charged with Federal Crimes in Breonna Taylor shooting

Taylor’s mom, Tamika Palmer, said she’s waited 874 days for federal charges to be filed and has beaten “everything sent to break” her. Her daughter’s death has taken her to a “place that we can’t even imagine,” she said.

“Every day’s been March 13 for me,” Palmer said, referring to the day Taylor was killed in 2020.

CNN:

Former Detective Joshua Jaynes, 40, Detective Kelly Goodlett and Sgt. Kyle Meany, 35, were charged with submitting a false affidavit to search Taylor’s home ahead of the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department’s raid, and then working together to create a “false cover story in an attempt to escape responsibility for their roles in preparing the warrant affidavit that contained false information,” according to court documents.

Ex-detective Brett Hankison is alleged to have “willfully used unconstitutionally excessive force … when he fired his service weapon into Taylor’s apartment through a covered window and covered glass door.” He is charged with depriving Taylor and a guest in her home “of their constitutional rights by firing shots through a bedroom window that was covered with blinds and a blackout curtain,” the US Department of Justice said.

The 46-year-old also faces charges of depriving three of Taylor’s neighbors of their constitutional rights as, according to the indictment, the bullets he fired traveled through a wall in Taylor’s home and into an adjacent apartment.

Jaynes and Meany stand accused of willfully depriving Taylor of her constitutional rights by drafting and approving a false affidavit to obtain a search warrant, while knowing “the affidavit contained false and misleading statements, omitted material facts, relied on stale information, and was not supported by probable cause,” the DOJ statement said. Both men “knew that the execution of the search warrant would be carried out by armed LMPD officers and could create a dangerous situation both for those officers and for anyone who happened to be in Taylor’s home,” it said.



Goodlett conspired with Jaynes and Meany to “falsify the search warrant for Taylor’s home and to cover up their actions afterward,” the statement said.

Jaynes and another detective tried to cover up their actions by drafting a bogus investigative letter and making false statements to investigators, according to the statement. Jaynes falsified a report in hopes of impeding a criminal probe into Taylor’s death; Meany also made false statements, the statement said.

Goodlett and Jaynes met in a garage weeks after the botched raid and conspired to relay false information to investigators, the attorney general alleged.

“We allege that Ms. Taylor’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when defendants Joshua Jaynes, Kyle Meany and Kelly Goodlett sought a warrant to search Ms. Taylor’s home knowing the officers lacked probable cause for the search,” Garland said. Continue reading on CNN

Original article from Business Insider