LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Breonna Taylor’s next-door neighbor said she was jolted from sleep by the sound of a battering ram as gunfire ripped into her apartment the night of the raid that left Taylor dead.
Chelsey Napper, who was pregnant at the time, called 911 twice after bullets pierced a wall she shared with Taylor and shattered her apartment’s glass patio door.
“It was so scary and crazy I didn’t know what was going on,” Napper testified. She lived in the apartment with her boyfriend and her 5-year-old son.
It “sounded like somebody set off a bomb or something” outside their apartment, she testified.
Former Louisville police detective Brett Hankison is charged with firing into a neighbor's apartment during the botched March 2020 narcotics raid. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was fatally shot by two other officers after Taylor's boyfriend fired a shot that hit an officer who had burst through the front door.
Tuesday began the second week of the trial. Last week, jurors visited Taylor's former apartment and heard testimony from several officers who were at the scene that night.
During opening statements last week, prosecutors emphasized to jurors that the case is not about the killing of Taylor or police decisions that led to the raid. They said the focus should be on Hankison’s shots and the near harm they caused.
Napper’s testimony Tuesday afternoon concluded the case by prosecutors, who called dozens of witnesses over five days. Hankison is expected to testify in the trial on Wednesday.
Napper said she and Etherton were stuck for hours in the apartment and at one point police aimed guns at Etherton when he looked out the shattered glass door. She said she learned days later that it was the police who shot into their apartment and a battering ram knocking down Taylor’s door that had startled her.
A police firearms instructor said Louisville officers are trained to identify a target before firing weapons in a threatening situation as testimony continued in the trial of a former officer charged in the raid that left Breonna Taylor dead.
Hankison was fired a few months after the early morning March 13, 2020, narcotics raid for firing “blindly” into Taylor's apartment. He fired 10 shots, though none hit Taylor. Some of his shots went through Taylor's apartment and into a neighbor's dwelling with a shared wall.
Matt Gelhausen, a firearms instructor with Louisville police, said Tuesday that officers are taught to make sure a perceived threat is isolated “from any others that are in close proximity.”
Hankison's attorney has argued that Hankison moved away from Taylor's door, rounded a corner and fired shots into Taylor's glass door to “defend and save the lives of his fellow officers.” Hankison told investigators about two weeks after the raid that he thought he saw a person with a long gun or AR-15 rife inside Taylor's apartment. That interview with Louisville police investigators was played for the jury last week.
Only Taylor's boyfriend's handgun was found in the apartment. The boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, and Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, were in the courtroom Tuesday along with other family members.
Walker told investigators after the shooting that he thought an intruder was breaking into the apartment. Police used a battering ram to take down the door and Walker's bullet hit former police Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the leg. After Walker's shot, Mattingly and another officer, Myles Cosgrove, opened fire into the apartment, but struck Taylor. Walker was not hurt.
Hankison told investigators in the March 2020 interview that he looked into the door once it came down and thought he saw “a figure in a shooting stance.”
Gelhausen agreed with Hankison's attorney, Stewart Mathews, during questioning that serving search warrants is “an inherently dangerous task.”
Hankison is charged with three counts of wanton endangerment, a felony with a sentencing range of one to five years.
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