One of the three Louisville cops involved in the botched raid that ended in the shooting death of Breonna Taylor said in a new interview that one of the things he would have done differently was to burst inside her apartment without giving her time to answer several knocks on the door.
“We expected that Breonna was going to be there by herself. That’s why we gave her so much time. And in my opinion that was a mistake,” Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, 47, who was wounded in the raid, said on “Good Morning America” on Tuesday.
“What would I have done differently, the answer to that is simple now that I’ve been thinking about it,” the 20-year veteran said. “Number one, we would have either served the no-knock warrant or we would have done the normal thing we do, which is five to 10 seconds.
”To not give people time to formulate a plan, not give people time to get their senses so they have an idea of what they’re doing. Because if that had happened … Breonna Taylor would be alive, 100 percent,” he added about the 26-year-old black EMT.
Mattingly, Brett Hankison and Myles Cosgrove stormed Taylor’s apartment while executing a no-knock warrant March 13 and opened fire, killing the woman while she slept.
Hankinson was charged with wanton endangerment for shooting into her neighbor’s apartment and later fired. The others were cleared by a Kentucky grand jury of any criminal liability in Taylor’s death.
Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, returned fire at the plainclothes cops, saying he did not know they were police officers. Charges against Walker were later dropped.
Police said officers believed Taylor’s ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover had been using her apartment to stash drugs and cash, but nothing was found.
Speaking publicly for the first time about the incident, Mattingly expressed empathy for Taylor’s family, saying deadly encounter is something all good cops dread.
“I feel for her. I hurt for her mother and for her sisters,” Mattingly, a father of four and grandfather, said in the joint ABC News and Courier Journal interview.
“It’s not just a passing ‘Oh, this is part of the job, we did it and move on.’ It’s not like that. I mean Breonna Taylor is now attached to me for the rest of my life. And that’s not again, ‘Woe is me.’ That’s me feeling for them,” Mattingly said.
“That’s me having a heart and a soul, going as a parent, ‘How do you move on?’ I don’t know. I don’t want to experience it,” he added.
Mattingly said that on the fateful day he worked a full shift before volunteering to help other narcotics officers who had been investigating Glover for alleged drug trafficking.
He recounted that he and several of his fellow officers were told during a briefing that Glover would be at another location on the list of warrants being served across the city at the same time.
“They wanted to do the right thing and they said, ‘Give her time to come to the door,’” Mattingly said, adding that he and the other officers had no clue that Walker would be inside and armed with a licensed pistol.
Walker and 11 other witnesses have claimed they didn’t hear the officers announce themselves before they burst inside. He said he fired the gun because he thought the cops were intruders.
Mattingly said that as his team arrived, a neighbor emerged from his apartment, began arguing with them and engaged in an expletive-laden verbal dispute with Hankison.
“I remember him saying at one point, ‘She’s a good girl, leave her alone’ or something to that effect,” Mattingly said. “Finally, I looked at Brett and said, ‘Leave that alone and pay attention to what we’re doing.’”
Mattingly recalled banging on Taylor’s door, but not announcing immediately that they were police.
“So we get up, I remember banging on the door, it’s open hand, hard smack, bam, bam, bam, bam. First time, didn’t announce. Just hoping she would come to the door,” he said, adding that second time they banged on the door, they repeatedly shouted, ‘Police, search warrant!”
When no one answered, he continued, they rammed the door open and he saw two figures at the end of the hall.
“As soon as I turned the corner, my eyes went straight to the barrel of this gun. I could see the tip of it. And my eyes just focused in on it as soon as I saw it,” Mattingly said.
Describing the encounter, which “happened in milliseconds,” Mattingly said he heard a shot and felt a burning sensation in his leg.
“As soon as I felt the smack on my leg and the heat, I — boom, boom — returned four shots, four shots,” Mattingly said, adding that he fired two more rounds as the gunman ran into a bedroom.
Ballistics tests have determined that Cosgrove fired the shot that killed Taylor.
“I reached down and felt my leg. I could feel a handful of blood and the heat — I thought my femoral artery. I said I can’t stand up because I’m going to pump the blood out if I keep pushing forward,” Mattingly said.
“I remember I scooted back and sat on my bottom and I scooted my gun out for some reason. I let go of it. Then I thought real quick, ‘What am I doing? I can’t let go of my gun.’ I grabbed my gun and I pulled it back in and I yelled, I said, ‘Man, I got shot in my femoral.’”
The officer said he managed to hobble out of the apartment and fell to the ground.
Asked how he felt when he heard Taylor was dead, Mattingly said, “It was tragic. It’s horrible. Again, that’s a situation that you dread, that you pray never happens.”
Taylor’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city that was ultimately settled for $12 million. The city has admitted no wrongdoing in the incident, but agreed to institute police reforms.
Mattingly, who is white, insisted Taylor’s death had nothing to do with her race.
“This is not relatable to George Floyd. This is nothing like that,” he said. “It’s not Ahmaud Arbery. It’s nothing like it. These are two totally different types of incidences.”
Mattingly said his family has received multiple death threats, including one in which someone threatened to kidnap his son and torture him.
“When they started personally getting the death threats, as a father you can imagine how that would feel. When your daughters are getting threatened — I mean, it just makes you feel helpless, number one, and angry at the same time because here you feel like you were trying to help the city,” he said.
“I spent 20 years giving my time, blood, my energy trying to help the city that I grew up in, that I love,” Mattingly said. “And now when something tragic like this happens, now your family is the one that everybody wants to come after.”
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