Breonna Taylor's neighbors sue former Louisville police officer, claiming her guilty plea entitles them to damages

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Two people who lived in adjacent apartments to Breonna Taylor the night she was shot and killed by Louisville Metro Police filed a lawsuit against the officer who recently pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the 2020 raid.

Chelsey Napper and Cody Etherton filed the suit Tuesday, more than two years after also suing LMPD officers Myles Cosgrove, Brett Hankison and Jonathan Mattingly, saying they "blindly fired" shots into their apartment on March 13, 2020, "with a total disregard for the value of human life." Taylor died, and several shots fired by Hankison ended up in her neighbors' apartments.

In the suit filed Wednesday, they argue that former Officer Kelly Goodlett's recent guilty plea proves that the allegations in their suit are true.

"Based on deliberate falsehoods in the completion by Goodlett of an application for the search warrant and an affidavit in support of the search warrant and misrepresentation of facts supporting probable cause, the warrant was unlawful," the lawsuit states. "Other LMPD Officers should never have executed that warrant. As a result of their unlawful raid, Ms. Taylor died and the plaintiffs suffered physical and emotional injury and legal injury in the form of lost constitutional rights and property damage."

Goodlett was one of four LMPD officers charged with federal crimes earlier this year in connection with the fatal raid on Taylor’s home. Ex-detective Joshua Jaynes, Hankison, and former officers Kyle Meany and Goodlett faced charges that include civil rights offenses, unlawful conspiracies, unconstitutional use of force and obstruction, Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a news conference Aug. 6.

As part of a plea agreement, Goodlett admitted she knowingly included false information in the search warrant affidavit used to raid Taylor's home and then conspired with another officer to cover it up. She resigned from the department immediately after being charged in U.S. district court earlier this month.

The charges announced by Garland in August centered around the search warrant obtained by police before they conducted the raid on Taylor's home. According to federal prosecutors, Goodlett's partner, Jaynes, asked a judge to approve the warrant a day before the early-morning raid March 13. Jaynes claimed in an affidavit presented to Jefferson Circuit Judge Mary Shaw that a postal inspector verified that drug suspect Jamarcus Glover, who had dated Taylor, was using Taylor's home to receive parcels.

He also wrote that Glover was using Taylor's home as his address even though he had not been there in many weeks, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Glover was at the center of a narcotics probe by Louisville police. The warrant for Taylor's home was executed around the same time that police served other warrants on suspected drug houses in west Louisville — some 10 miles away.

"The affidavit falsely claimed that officers had verified that the target of the alleged drug trafficking operation had received packages at Ms. Taylor's address," Garland said when announcing the indictments. "In fact, defendants Jaynes and Goodlett knew that was not true."

Tony Gooden, a U.S. postal inspector in Louisville, told WDRB News in May 2020 that Louisville police didn't confer with his office. He said a different law enforcement agency asked his office in January 2020 to investigate whether any potentially suspicious mail was going to the unit. The local office concluded that there wasn't.

"There's no packages of interest going there," Gooden said.

Prosecutors said Goodlett and Jaynes knew false information was in the search warrant affidavit when it was presented to a judge and that other information was stale.

U.S. District Court Judge Rebecca Grady Jennings could sentence Goodlett to up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years supervised probation.

Napper and Etherton asked for damages that would "compensate them for their legal and physical injuries and the violation of their rights." Earlier this year, they asked a judge to move their 2020 lawsuit out of Louisville because "fatigue" has biased the public in favor of police, flipping the argument made by the former officer ahead of his criminal trial. It remains pending in federal court.

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