Officers Charged In Breonna Taylor’s Death

Four officers involved in the shooting death of Grand Rapids native Breonna Taylor have been arrested due to the botched 2020 raid that killed the first responder at the height of the Covid 19 pandemic.

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Three of the officers, Joshua Jaynes, Kelly Goodlett, and Kyle Meany, have been charged with creating a false story to garner a search warrant for Taylor's residence. A fourth officer, Brett Hankison, was officially charged with 'deprivation of rights'

The charges were announced Thursday morning, August 4th, by US Attorney General Merrick Garland:

The Justice Department has charged four current and former Louisville Metro Police Department officers with federal crimes related to Breonna Taylor’s death...Among other things, the federal charges announced today allege that members of LMPD’s Place-Based Investigations Unit falsified the affidavit used to obtain the search warrant of Ms. Taylor’s home, that this act violated federal civil rights laws, and that those violations resulted in Ms. Taylor’s death. Breonna Taylor should be alive today. The Justice Department is committed to defending and protecting the civil rights of every person in this country.  That was this Department’s founding purpose, and it remains our urgent mission.

 

About Breonna Taylor:

Breonna Taylor was a former Grand Rapids Public School student and graduated from Kelloggsville High School. She relocated to Kentucky where she became an EMT and was a frontline worker during the pandemic. Breonna Taylor, was 26 when she was fatally shot in her Louisville, Kentucky apartment on March 13, 2020, when at least seven police officers forced entry into the apartment as part of a botched investigation into drug dealing operations.