On the second day of the federal trial for Brett Hankison, a former Louisville officer facing civil rights charges in the botched raid that killed Breonna Taylor, a familiar face took the stand to testify. However, that testimony expressed shock and disappointment instead of support.
Former Louisville officer Myles Cosgrove took the stand Friday to testify on Hankison’s actions the night of March 13, 2020, per The AP. Cosgrove recalled the chain of events, when he and former officer Jonathan Mattingly returned fire after being shot in the leg by Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend. After bullets sprayed toward Walker and Taylor, who was unarmed and standing beside him, Cosgrove said the officers retreated to the parking lot.
Cosgrove recalled seeing muzzle flashes from the parking lot which he later discovered came from Hankison shooting “haphazardly” through the glass door of the apartment. He said at Hankison’s vantage point, a target could not be identified through the drapes and blinds covering the windows.
“In my opinion, it’s dangerous to do that. It put my life in danger and anyone else’s life in danger. You have to have a target to shoot at. I was concerned. I was kind of shocked, actually. I was upset at the fact that that happened,” he testified.
He’s shocked?! Did he forget the part where he alone fired 16 shots - one of which inevitably striking Taylor - while also not properly identifying his target? Anyways, Cosgrove’s testimony seemed to throw a wrench in Hankison’s teary-eyed testimony when he took the stand during his state trial last year.
Read more from The New York Times:
From the side of the building, Mr. Hankison fired 10 bullets through a sliding-glass door in Ms. Taylor’s apartment and a window, both of which were covered by blinds. Mr. Hankison’s lawyer asked him what he had been aiming at, and Mr. Hankison said he had been firing toward the muzzle flashes that he saw in the apartment. Mr. Walker did not fire his gun after his initial shot.
In June 2020, the police chief at the time fired Mr. Hankison, writing in a letter that Mr. Hankison had “blindly” fired into the apartment and describing his actions as “a shock to the conscience.”
Cosgrove spent the rest of his time on the stand giving a boo-hoo statement about how the night of Taylor’s death effected him for the past three years.
“It’s so powerful to take someone’s life… It’s not the outcome that I wanted,” Cosgrove said on the stand. “What I did protected my life and protected Jon’s [Mattingly’s] life. I can live with that, humbly, knowing that. But the outcome is the least desirable thing I would ever wish.”
Cosgrove was fired along with Hankison by the Louisville police department in 2021 but recently was hired by another Kentucky county department, per The AP.