Breonna Taylor’s family claims that her home was targeted, and her subsequent shooting death is the result of a city operation to clear a neighborhood undergoing gentrification.
The Taylor family’s attorneys filed court documents to amend the wrongful death suit against Brett Hankison, Myles Cosgrove, and Jonathan Mattingly. These three cops killed Taylor while executing a no-knock warrant on her home. The documents state that the raid on Breonna’s home “starts with a political need to clear out a street for a large scale real estate development project and finishes with a newly formed, renegade police unit violating all levels of policy, protocol and policing standard.”
The lawsuit alleges that a task force was formed specifically to clear out a neighborhood in west Louisville, Kentucky, so that a real estate developer could build a “high dollar, legacy-creating” development. However, the “primary roadblock” to the development was Taylor’s ex-boyfriend, who rented a home in the area.
The task force led the police department to believe that the area was crime-ridden and drug-infested, home to the city’s largest drug rings.
Taylor’s home was over 10 miles away from the neighborhood in question, and her death could have been avoided by running the tags on the cars in front of the home. It would have been clear that the cars belonged to Taylor and her boyfriend, not the suspect listed on the warrant, her family insists. Per TMZ, the first five no-knock warrants of the year, including Taylor’s home, were executed for this project alone.
“Connecting the dots, it’s clear that these officers should never have been at Breonna Taylor’s home in the first place, and that they invaded the residence with no probable cause.” attorney Ben Crump tells TMZ, “The officers who robbed Breonna of her life — and Tamika Palmer of her daughter— exhibited outrageous, reckless, willful, wanton and unlawful conduct.”
A spokeswoman for Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer called the allegations “outrageous” and are “without foundation of supporting facts.”
“They are insulting to the neighborhood members of the Vision Russell initiative and all the people involved in the years of work being done to revitalize the neighborhoods of West Louisville,” Jean Porter said in a statement.
