Breonna Taylor’s family lawsuit claims that police had no cause for raid

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A lawsuit from Breonna Taylor’s family says Louisville police called off a warrant search of her apartment after a drug suspect was located elsewhere. But it alleges the police then went ahead with the deadly raid to look for other suspects.

Attorneys for Taylor’s family say police “should never have been at Breonna Taylor’s home in the first place.”

The man who police connected to Taylor was arrested that night more than 10 miles away.

The suit says police went ahead with the search at Taylor’s home to look for other suspects who did not have a connection to Taylor.

The warrant used to enter Taylor’s home just after midnight was secured by police observing an alleged drug dealer, identified in the complaint as “JG,” at Taylor’s home two months earlier. Taylor and the man had a prior relationship, the family’s suit said.

But that man, Jamarcus Glover, was arrested that night more than 10 miles (16 kilometers) away, though two other suspects the police were looking for were not with Glover, the suit said. Those suspects, identified in the suit as “AW” and “DC” never had a relationship with Taylor and neither looked like Kenneth Walker, Taylor’s boyfriend who was with her the night she was shot, the court filing said.

The suit said “AW” lived at a separate address that police also had a warrant for, but they proceeded to search Taylor’s house to see if he or the other man were there.

An ambulance that had been stationed near Taylor’s apartment in anticipation of the initial search had been called off, the suit said. It said the EMS unit was cleared because police “had never actually intended to raid Breonna’s home unless (Glover) was there.”

“As such, it does indeed appear that the (police) ‘hit the wrong house’ when they went to Springfield (Taylor’s apartment), rather than actually hitting the house in which the target was actually located,” the 31-page complaint said.

The suit, which named the three officers as defendants, said Taylor lived for another five or six minutes after she was shot but an ambulance was not on the scene.

The complaint also said police conducted a concerted effort to remove Glover and other alleged drug dealers from a residential area near downtown to make way for a new development with federal funding.

Jean Porter, a spokeswoman for Mayor Greg Fischer, called the allegations “outrageous” and “without foundation or supporting facts.” Other advocates of the project, including Mary Ellen Weiderwohl, who leads the city community development group Louisville Forward, said those allegations in the suit are a “gross mischaracterization” of a plan to build new affordable housing in low-income areas.