The trial of the one Louisville police officer who faced criminal charges after the March 2020 raid that killed Breonna Taylor began yesterday. Former detective Brett Hankison is charged not with killing Taylor, an unarmed 25-year-old EMT who died in a hail of bullets after cops broke into her apartment in the middle of the night, but with endangering her neighbors by firing blindly into the building.
Hankison "is the one that fired the shots that are the subject of this case," defense attorney Stew Matthews told the jury. "That's not the issue. The issue is: What was the reasoning behind his firing those shots?" Reasoning is probably too strong a word for what was going on inside Hankison's brain that night. But Matthews suggested that the detective's actions were understandable in the circumstances. "You are going to discover that this scene was total chaos," he said.
