Why were police at Breonna Taylor’s home? Here’s what an investigative summary says
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A detailed investigative report written more than a month after Louisville Metro Police fatally shot Breonna Taylor in her apartment on March 13 provides the first comprehensive look at the narcotics case that brought officers to her door.
Though police recovered no drugs or cash from the 26-year-old emergency room technician’s apartment in Louisville’s South End, the May 1 police report shows how officers linked Taylor to a narcotics investigation centered 10 miles away – largely through evidence that has since been challenged.
Why police targeted Taylor’s apartment for a “no knock” search warrant after midnight has been a key question in the case since her shooting became a national rallying cry for racial justice in May.
After police used a battering ram to break open Taylor’s front door, her boyfriend Kenneth Walker fired a single shot, which police said struck Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the femoral artery.
Mattingly, along with Detective Myles Cosgrove and now-fired Detective Brett Hankison, returned fire, killing Taylor. An attorney for Walker said Tuesday that a fellow officer more likely shot Mattingly than Walker.Kenneth Walker: Lawyer for Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend sues police, says he didn’t shoot officer100 days of protests: Looking back at moments that have shaped the Breonna Taylor movement
Police had search warrant for Taylor’s address
Misinformation shared on social media suggested the officers showed up at the wrong house, but police had a search warrant signed by Circuit Judge Mary Shaw for Taylor’s address and for her.
The eight-page LMPD report reinforces, however, that Taylor was not the main target of the narcotics investigation, which initially centered around other individuals accused of selling drugs.
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The report’s author was Detective Joshua Jaynes, who secured the March 12 warrant for Taylor’s home and four suspected drug houses.
The report also shows that LMPD’s new Place-Based Investigations Squad spent about 2½ months conducting heavy surveillance.
Taylor was linked to the suspects in that investigation, according to the report, because a car registered in her name stopped in early January at one of the properties being watched.
Moreover, it states that Jamarcus Glover, a convicted drug dealer and Taylor’s former boyfriend, picked up a package at her home Jan. 16 while police were watching him.
The report further says:
- It was Mattingly, the officer who was shot at Taylor’s apartment, who asked the postal service whether Glover was receiving packages at Taylor’s apartment. Jaynes wrote in a March 12 sworn affidavit for a search warrant that he had verified that Glover was receiving packages at Taylor’s home through a postal inspector (a Louisville postal inspector later told WDRB news that wasn’t true).
- Glover listed Taylor’s home as his address on a Chase bank account, and a search warrant for the account was executed on March 19, six days after her death.
- Glover listed Taylor’s phone number as his when he filed a complaint against a police officer in February for towing his red Dodge Charger for a parking violation.
Jaynes is on administrative reassignment pending an investigation of “how and why the search warrant was approved,” interim Police Chief Robert Schroeder said in June.
The May 1 report was co-signed by Detective Kelly Goodlett, another Place-Based Investigations officer who also authored a controversial 39-page LMPD report written after Taylor’s death that detailed her ties with Glover, the main suspect in the narcotics case.
Glover told The Louisville Courier Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, in an Aug. 26 interview that Taylor had nothing to do with illicit drugs. He also denied that Taylor had been holding money for him, despite telling a caller that she was during a taped phone conversation March 13 at Metro Corrections.
Police suspected, according to the May report written by Jaynes, that Glover “may be keeping narcotics and/or proceeds from the sale of narcotics at (Taylor’s apartment) for safekeeping.”
A property seizure log completed after searching Taylor’s apartment following the shooting listed no drugs or money.
The report also reflects that the investigation into suspected narcotics trafficking continued beyond the execution of search warrants and Taylor’s death on March 13. Uncut and unedited: Livestreamers have become a key cog in the Louisville protests
Interest in ‘epicenter’ of drugs
The Place-Based Investigations Squad, a unit created in late December 2019 to focus on small areas “ridden with violent crime,” turned its attention first to an area between South 26th Street and West Broadway, including Elliott Avenue, according to Jaynes.
Detectives gathered calls for service, incident reports and drug crime tips, learning that First Division officers had conducted narcotics searches in December 2019 on three residences.
Officer Charles Heller wrote in three Dec. 30 search warrant affidavits that a confidential informant had reported people selling crack cocaine from 2424 Elliott Ave. in the past 48 hours, and the driver of a vehicle stopped by police had reported people were also using 2605 W. Muhammad Ali Blvd. for the drug sales.
The warrants gave police authority to search Glover, along with Dominique Crenshaw, De’Marius Bowman and Cleve Knight.
A judge whose signature isn’t legible signed all three warrants and authorized police’s “no knock” request.
Heller wrote that it was important the warrants be “no knock” search warrants because “it is common for drug traffickers to protect their drugs with guns” and that the criminal history of known associates created a “particularly dangerous situation.”
“It was determined,” Jaynes wrote, “that the epicenter of the narcotics trafficking in the area was 2424 Elliott Ave.” Breonna’s Law: Rep. Attica Scott proposes banning no-knock search warrants across Kentucky
Following that decision, officers kicked off weeks of surveillance: Installing a police camera, following vehicles and conducting pedestrian and traffic stops.
In the weeks before the search warrants were executed March 13, a confidential informant working with police went to Elliott Avenue and confirmed narcotics were being sold there, according to the investigative summary from Jaynes.
Why was Breonna Taylor part of the investigation?
Taylor isn’t referenced much in the report, but here’s what police do say:
- On Jan. 2, a pole camera installed at South 24th Street and Elliott Avenue captured footage of a white Chevrolet Impala registered to Taylor pull up in front of 2424 Elliott Ave. The camera footage showed Glover exiting from the passenger side.
- A red Dodge Charger that police say was used by both Glover and Adrian Walker, a co-defendant, made “frequent trips” between Elliott Avenue and Springfield Drive, where Taylor lived, according to “physical and electronic surveillance,” Jaynes wrote.
- On Jan. 16, Glover was photographed by police entering Taylor’s apartment and left with a “suspected USPS package.” He then drove to 2605 W. Muhammad Ali Blvd., which Jaynes described in the search warrant affidavit as a “known drug house.”
Glover has since disputed some of that surveillance evidence.
He told The Courier Journal in an Aug. 26 interview he’d worried about deliveries to his house being stolen, and Taylor had agreed to have the items sent to her apartment instead.
“Nothing even been illegal there,” he said. “Getting shoes and clothes coming through the mail is not illegal. Nothing illegal at all.”
Glover also noted that LMPD had a surveillance camera outside of 2424 Elliott Ave., so he said police knew Taylor wasn’t doing anything illegal when she came over.
“We’re literally standing outside,” Glover said. “They had their camera. … They seen everything. No illegal activity. A hug is not illegal. … She’s not bringing me no boxes, she’s not bringing nothing.”
The leaked LMPD report detailing the links between Taylor and Glover referenced recorded jail calls, including one made hours after her fatal police shooting, in which Glover tells his girlfriend Kiera Bradley that Taylor was holding $8,000 for him and she had been “handling all my money.”
Bradley told The Courier Journal in an Aug. 31 interview that she thought their heated conversation prompted Glover to say that.
“I think he was just saying that because he had a bond. I’m like, ‘Where is your money?’ I was upset. You can look at the calls, I was talking about my daughter. … You know, it was an argument. I think that he was just like, she had all my money because he had a bond,” Bradley said.
No evidence of Taylor holding money for Glover is included in Jaynes’ May report, but it notes that a search warrant on Glover’s Chase bank account, approved by a judge six days after Taylor’s death, shows that Glover listed his residence as Taylor’s apartment on Springfield Drive, Jaynes wrote.
(The criminal discovery file for Glover’s pending case includes a Chase Bank record obtained by police, apparently through a Feb. 6 grand jury subpoena, that lists Glover’s address as Taylor’s apartment on Springfield Drive.)
Records reviewed by The Courier Journal show police also had signed search warrants for phone numbers connected to Glover that would have allowed them to review information on calls and locations.Background: Breonna Taylor was briefly alive after police shot her. But no one tried to treat her
The March 12 search warrant affidavits and May 1 report don’t list any evidence obtained from that effort.
However, one of the phone numbers tracked, documents show, was Taylor’s.
Police sought a search warrant for her phone number Feb. 17, after Glover “attempted to file a complaint” three days earlier against an officer who had towed his Dodge Charger for a parking violation, Jaynes wrote. Glover provided a phone number registered to Taylor.
The warrant, signed and sealed Feb. 17 by Jefferson Circuit Judge Charles Cunningham, allowed police to access all text messages, call details, cell tower locations and detailed subscriber information “that will be valuable to the investigation” for a 30-day period.
Jaynes wrote that he “has received information that Breonna Taylor may be the suspected girlfriend of Jamarcus Glover” and “it is not uncommon for drug traffickers to use phone numbers under different names to avoid detection from law enforcement.”
Jaynes added the “phone ping” would allow police to look into Glover’s “criminal enterprise” and potentially find “other locations that will help the investigation” because police had “exhausted conventional means of surveillance.”
Nothing indicates when police executed that warrant.
On Feb. 21, four days after obtaining the first warrant, Jaynes got an additional sealed search warrant for a Cingular Wireless phone number police believed belonged to Glover. That warrant also doesn’t note when it was executed.
The discovery file for Glover’s pending criminal case additionally includes a background check of Taylor dated May 18, more than two months after her death.
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What happened after Breonna Taylor’s shooting?
After March 13, detectives watched pedestrian and vehicle traffic through the pole camera at Elliott Avenue, which they said indicated narcotics trafficking continued.
“Although the traffic isn’t as heavy as it was before, it is apparent that these individuals are still selling narcotics from this location,” Jaynes wrote.
Over the next few weeks, detectives conducted at least three traffic stops on vehicles leaving the Elliott Avenue home – once for failing to wear seat belts and another for an improper turn – and found drugs in the vehicles.
One of those traffic stops prompted Goodlett to write an April 8 note to the city’s public nuisance and Metro 311 email accounts, documenting the property’s latest infraction – it’s “strike 3.”
City documents show that Goodlett and the Place-Based Initiative officers had worked closely with city Codes and Regulations Department personnel for months to keep tabs on the Elliott Avenue house.
On Jan. 22, the property owner, Law Mar Inc. and Gerald Happle, received its first notice of criminal activity “constituting a public nuisance.”
On March 17, following the March 13 warrants, the property was formally deemed a public nuisance.Read this: What to know about the investigations into the police shooting of Breonna Taylor
Happle called the next day to ask about donating the house.
The city gave Happle an order to vacate the home on April 13. By then, Happle already had given his renters notice to leave the home and signed an application to donate the house to the city.
On April 22, detectives executed another “no knock” search warrant on 2424 Elliott Ave. – the third in five months.
Police found crack cocaine, suspected ecstasy or MDMA, marijuana and other drug paraphernalia, Jaynes wrote.
The same day, with the aid of the city’s Codes and Regulations Department, police cleared and boarded up 2424 Elliott Ave.
On June 5 – what would have been Taylor’s 27th birthday – Happle signed over the deed on the house. The city paid $1.
Corrupt squad scoured Baltimore streets in pursuit of black men to search, arrest — and steal from
By Justin Fenton
June 12, 2019
car came screaming through the rain-slicked intersection in downtown Baltimore that August night, slamming into Serigne Gueye’s Hyundai Sonata and spinning it nearly 360 degrees.
Gueye, an immigrant from Senegal with a pregnant wife at home, sat battered and stunned. His car was totaled.
“The shock was very, very terrible,” he would say later.
A couple of blocks away, Sgt. Wayne Jenkins’ squad of corrupt plainclothes police officers lingered, debating whether to help clean up their latest mess or slip away without anyone ever knowing they were there.
They had been chasing the first car just prior to the crash — planning to stop it on a pretext, hoping they might find a gun or drugs when they did. The fleeing driver had blown through a red light, struck Gueye’s vehicle and hit a building near the University of Maryland Shock Trauma center.
Surveillance video footage shows bystanders trying to help, followed by arriving patrol officers.
“That’s the thing with Wayne. He’s a little too much with this s—,” Detective Daniel Hersl observed as the officers watched from afar, his comments captured on a secret microphone placed in the car by federal agents. “These car chases — this is what happens.”https://player.vimeo.com/video/341580106
The officers wondered if they’d already been implicated by surveillance cameras. Maybe they could change their time cards, one suggested, so no one would know they’d been on duty.
Another said not to worry; he thought the people in the accident were unconscious anyway. Then, over the police radio, the word came down from their leader:
“Go back to headquarters,” Jenkins said.
So they did. Someone else could tend to the people in the smashed-up cars, two of whom were taken to a hospital for treatment. No one needed to know that speeding plainclothes cops in unmarked vehicles had caused the wreck.
At the time of the crash in the summer of 2016, Jenkins, then 36, had dodged repeated accusations of wrongdoing and been put at the helm of the Baltimore Police Department’s reconstituted Gun Trace Task Force — the latest in a series of variously named elite squads charged with making a dent in Charm City’s pernicious crime rate.Support our journalism
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Jenkins was a chronically crooked cop who for at least several years had been stealing drugs and money seized from city residents under the guise of collecting police evidence. Sometimes he arrested the suspects, sometimes not.
The acclaimed sergeant brought to the squad three men who’d worked under him in the past — and who had shared in some of the illegal bounty.
They were joining a team, it turned out, already staffed with some like-minded officers who had engaged in similar activity.
But to keep operating in the plainclothes unit — and enjoy the lack of supervision that came with the assignment — they had to get the job done.
The job of the Gun Trace Task Force was to get guns off the streets of Baltimore. That endeavor might have involved methodical investigations in which officers painstakingly assembled and documented evidence needed for search warrants that could lead to the collection of illegal firearms.
But often, Sergeant Jenkins’ team preferred to just “go hunting,” as Hersl once described it to a jury.
That is, prowl high-crime neighborhoods of the city, using questionable and often illegal tactics to look for guns, drugs and cash. A favorite method was to swoop in on people not actually suspected of a crime, get into their cars and search. It was the quickest way to get results.
The Baltimore Sun spent a year delving into the operations of the now notorious unit and its leader Jenkins, who was sentenced last June to 25 years in prison for federal racketeering crimes including robbery, extortion and overtime fraud. Six of his officers also are serving time.https://player.vimeo.com/video/341580155
In the first part of this series, The Sun described Jenkins’ rise to prominence in the Baltimore Police Department as an officer known for getting things done. Even as he was hailed as effective, there were red flags that he was planting evidence and fabricating facts to justify arrests.
Jenkins was sued at least four times early in his career, with settlements reached or juries finding fault in three of those cases.
A special unit of the Baltimore state’s attorney’s office began investigating his lies and even presented evidence to a grand jury but prosecutors concluded they didn’t have enough to charge him.
Being promoted to sergeant — and taking on responsibility for leading other officers — didn’t diminish his penchant for ignoring rules.
Looking for excuses to stop and search suspects, Jenkins and his squad were frequently involved in high-speed chases and crashes like the one involving Gueye.
Police department records show that Jenkins got into 12 reported accidents involving department vehicles, but he sparked countless more. The number is hard to quantify in part because Jenkins sometimes paid out of pocket to fix the cars. He had a crash bar installed on one of them — using money from one of their robberies, one of his officers said.
Even the less dramatic methods employed by Jenkins and his men involved questionable or improper conduct. Courts have given police great latitude to stop a vehicle for minor infractions, but videos of stops captured by the officers’ body cameras show they often resulted in searches that likely wouldn’t pass legal muster.
Not surprisingly, Jenkins’ arrests often didn’t hold up. A Baltimore Sun analysis of Jenkins’ cases from 2012-2016 found that 40 percent were dropped by prosecutors. In contrast, department-wide about a quarter of gun cases were dropped in 2016, The Sun’s analysis found.
Even while the officers’ cases were being thrown out, judges sought to reassure them that they were doing a good job. “They are in a high-crime area, they’re checking things out and they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing,” Baltimore Circuit Judge Pamela White said, while explaining that Jenkins and his unit had nevertheless violated the Constitution.
“Convey my appreciation to the officers for doing their job, notwithstanding my decision,” she said.
Beyond violating civil rights, Jenkins and his men were routinely stealing from people they encountered in their work, usually suspected drug dealers. The criminal behavior continued even when the U.S. Department of Justice sent investigators to the city for months to examine the conduct of the Baltimore police force.
Jenkins had been with the department for almost 13 years, four of them as sergeant, when he assumed command of the gun task force in June 2016.
